“Momentos Decisivos” comparte historias de tres exitosos individuos, en busca de esperanza. El ilusionista Jim Munroe fue diagnosticado con un cáncer incurable y luego de un trasplante de médula ósea, nació de nuevo. El jugador de futbol de la NFL David Tyree estaba en la cima de su carrera, cuando fue arrestado y su mundo se vino abajo. El encontró a Cristo y su corazón fue transformado. La cantante Lacey Sturm experimentó depresión y tuvo pensamientos suicidas hasta que encontró a Dios
Our days on earth are
like a shadow.
−King David
Do you know how many minutes
there are in a day?
Fourteen hundred and forty.
Do you know how many hours
there are in a week?
A hundred and sixty-eight.
It’s interesting to me
that rich people
cannot buy more hours.
Scientists cannot invent
new minutes.
You cannot even save time
to spend it
on another day.
You’ve got a little time today
and you say:
I’d like to save it up
for tomorrow.”
You can’t do it.
Do you number your days?
Do you realize how important
every single day is?
Defining Moments
Moment of a lifetime
I’ll never forget that moment.
It was so…
unexpected.
Besides, I wasn’t ready
to do what they were
asking me to do there.
One day I got a call
and then they made me an offer;
it was a huge offer.
They had told me:
“You’ll work as an actor.”
It was really like a dream.
The producers were taking
a huge risk with me;
it was not only a new channel,
it was a new soap opera,
but I was also a new actor.
I had never acted and they
were putting all their hopes in me;
It was at that exact moment
that I had to choose,
it was all or nothing.
I knew it could change
everything for me.
Moment of questioning
I remember the first moment
when I became completely blown away
and intrigued with the idea
of being a magician.
That was the moment I knew
that I could actually be good at this.
It’s the most fun thing
in the world for me.
I tend to like questions
a lot more than answers,
and what a magic trick does
is it forces you
into a place of questioning,
and it pulls the rug of reality
out from underneath you
to where you’re literally left in a place
where you don’t know
what is happening.
I was 9 years old when
I heard myself
on a loudspeaker for the first time,
it was a bit strange
because I wasn’t used to
hearing myself
so loudly,
but I kind of enjoyed it.
I realized at that moment
I was doing what I wanted to do
the rest of my life.
There is a time for everything…
and a season for every activity
under heaven.
−King Solomon.
As a magician you’re very
skeptical and you realize
that most of what’s going on
behind the scenes
is fake or false.
The idea of an all-powerful God
seems incredibly silly,
and when I talked to people
that would go to church,
I can remember thinking that they
were falling for a simple magic trick.
It’s like the Wizard of Oz,
behind the curtain,
controlling everything.
I grew up understanding
how to make people believe
something was real
when it was really not.
I am a master of phoniness.
I’m a charlatan by craft.
But I began to ask myself
a big God question.
I said, “God, if you are real,
then I need you to bring me back
“behind the curtain.
“I need you to show me
how it works
“I need you to make this
so real to me
that I can’t ignore it.”
I’ll never forget the day
this man walks into
my room and said,
“Mr. Munroe,
I don’t know how to tell you this,
but you have cancer.”
I said, “What?”
He looked at me and said,
“Mr. Munroe, we can’t cure you
of your disease.”
My wife and I…were…
in a very bad place.
“God, where are you?
I guess you aren’t
that great.”
We had been married 5 years,
we had a 3-year-old girl
and a 2-year-old little boy,
and I needed more time
with my family.
I needed more time.
Honestly, success brought all
sorts of problems into my life.
Being famous made me
start looking
for ways to cover up all
of those deficiencies
and holes in my life
and try to function better
in that dysfunctional way of life.
Fame began changing
my humility, my simplicity,
and fame started giving me
a certain power and control
that made me think
I had it all here,
and that if I said,
“Boom, I want that,”
I could get it, because
from one day to the next
I went from having nothing,
to having it all.
They brought me in
to do a soap opera
where there were twin brothers,
and one of them
was in a state of amnesia,
and the doctor assigned
to that brother,
the psychiatrist, was Mara;
that’s how I met her,
I met her on a set,
and then we started falling in love
and ended up getting married
and sharing the same family.
That was like a dream for me,
and when I had all of that,
I realized I wasn’t satisfied;
I identified myself with fame at times,
with possessions, in such a way
that money was becoming my God.
Everything that went on in my life
that people couldn’t see,
was very hard.
I’d be away from home
8 or 9 months
shooting all sorts of scenes,
and that started affecting
my family.
I began acting very neurotic
at home.
I started losing my patience
with Mara,
and with my children.
I didn’t want to come back home
and I suppose
they wouldn’t have felt comfortable
with me being there either.
That was the dream of being able
to have a wife, a family, a big house,
and a nice car,
and when I had all of that,
I realized I wasn’t satisfied.
I hated what I should
have loved,
I loved what I should
have hated.
At times in my life I…
felt my life
had no meaning really,
I had no desire to live.
No one ever told me that in
that successful career,
when you reach the top
there’s nothing.
On the outside you look good,
but on the inside you are searching
for something
that you haven’t found yet.
There has to be more to life
than this.
I take after my father a lot.
My earliest memories of him are
from the time I was 2 years old.
In fact, a lot of my artistic side
comes from him.
We had a happy family,
but soon after I was born,
my dad became an alcoholic.
And when I was 6 1/2 years old,
my dad died of cirrhosis of the liver.
To have my father die when I was
6 1/2 years of age
was maybe one of the
most difficult things
I had to experience and,
more difficult still,
was the time my mother
found love again
after my father died,
and I had to adjust
to a new family,
and began seeing myself
in my heart as an orphan
carried by the wind
wherever it took me.
That’s where music really played
a very important role,
it became my refuge,
my escape.
I remember at some point
I fell in love
with a young man
who broke my heart.
When my heart was broken,
all the feelings of being an orphan
began to resurface, feelings of loss.
And I thought,
“If only God had intervened
“to avoid my father’s death,
maybe I wouldn’t have to suffer
like I have all my life.”
I was very angry with God.
I hung around with people who
questioned the existence of God,
people with vices
who introduced me
to the vice of drinking.
What I had sworn I would never do,
that’s what I was doing.
Death had become a part
of my daily thinking.
Millions are crying,
“What can I do to be saved
from the pressures of life?”
The pressures are just so great.
We have great technology
that saves us time,
but we have
less time than ever.
The tensions in the home,
problems at work,
health problems,
making ends meet.
We want to scream at life.
We want to escape from life.
Adlai Stevenson once said,
“It’s not the days of your life,
but the life in your days
that count.”
We have so much time,
and for what?
The broken things in your heart
and in your life
can be restored in Christ
if you put your faith
and confidence in Him.
He died on the cross,
He rose from the dead for you.
He wants to give you guidance
in your life.
He wants to give you peace,
joy, and the security
of knowing that if you died
you would go to heaven,
but first there must be
a change,
you must change your course;
the Bible calls that repentance.
Repent.
I’ve been playing main characters
for almost 20 years,
and I always made sense
of the characters,
but I never made sense
of my life.
When I studied a soap opera,
if I didn’t understand something
about the character,
what I had to do
is ask the creator,
the creator of the soap opera,
I would call him and I would say,
“Why does he have such
an unpleasant relationship
with his father?”
But if I had a question
about my life,
I didn’t even know
who the Creator was,
I didn’t know who to run to
to help me.
A friend of mine worked
in the same soap opera I was in
and he worked
with the lighting crew
and he wore a t-shirt that said:
“Just one man can
make the difference.”
But on the back it said: “Jesus.”
I don’t know what happened but it drew
my attention and I came over and said:
“Claudio, how can just one man
make the difference?
“What’s up with this Jesus?
Why don’t you talk to me
about Jesus?”
The next day he came with
a Bible in his hand
and he shared Jesus Christ
with me;
I called Mara and told her,
“Mara, Claudio brought me a Bible.
Will you go to church with me?”
And that day both of us
went to church,
that day we really had
an encounter with Jesus,
our life changed like that,
it was like changing
from black to white, bam!
It’s really the greatest miracle
that has happened in our life.
I was lost for a long time
until I found out
that Jesus had died on the cross
to save my life from sin
and place me
in the right place.
He fulfilled everything
that needed to be fulfilled,
only Jesus can fill your heart.
Lord Jesus, we thank you…
It was incredible, only God
can redeem that way;
God is the only one
who can give you an identity.
“What is your life?
“You are a mist that appears
for a little while
and then vanishes.
−James 4:14.
Time is collapsing on us,
how much longer do we have?
The psalmist requested
that the Lord remember
how short my time is.
“My days are like a shadow
that declineth
“and I’m withered like grass,
“But thou, o Lord,
shall endure forever,
And thy remembrance
unto all generations”.
Think about it, God endures forever,
but on this earth we are like
a shadow that’s declining.
We all are dying.
From the moment you were born,
you started dying.
How much longer do we have?
The oncologist looked at me
and said, “Mr. Munroe,
“we can’t cure you
of your disease.
“There’s something, however,
that we would like to try,
“it’s called a bone marrow transplant.
“The problem with your body
is that your white blood cells
“are making bad copies
of bad copies.
“Your body is deceiving itself.
It’s playing a trick on itself.”
He said, “What we have
to do is destroy
“your immune system completely
and hope to find
“someone in the world whose DNA
matches yours enough
“to grow a brand-new
immune system,
a brand-new blood system
from scratch.
“We are going to substitute
someone’s perfect blood on your behalf
so you can live again.”
God said without the shedding
of blood there is no forgiveness.
There has to be a substitute for you
who will take the judgment
that you deserve, the death
you deserve.
And that substitute
became Jesus Christ.
I thought to myself,
“My time is running out,
I’m dying of cancer.”
It’s been hard to deal with.
Payton is 3 and Gabin is 2.
My two babies…
Should this take my life early
I love you.
They began the most vicious
concoction of chemotherapy
the goal of which was not just to
destroy the cancer in my body,
but literally to destroy me.
It was hell.
It was a slow death.
I’m really scared.
I’m trying not to be fearful,
but I am fearful,
I’m trying to be strong
for my wife and my family,
but I’m really scared.
We are waiting to hear from
the National Bone Marrow
Donor Program, where
7 million people
are currently registered
in the database
and there was one
perfect match for me.
Just one,
a 19 year-old female.
They said, “Mr. Munroe,
your bone marrow transplant
“is scheduled for April 23rd.
“You are going to get
a brand-new birthday.”
They said,
“You’ll be like a baby
“inside the womb again,
the nurses will celebrate
your new birth at the hospital.”
I had heard that
terminology before, too,
at the churches I had attended.
Literally, I was going to be born anew.
I’ll never forget it,
on April 23rd they brought
a bag of blood into my room,
and everybody was hoping
in that moment
that my body would
receive that new life,
that new blood.
I sit here today, 100% completely
cancer free.
And when they look at my blood today,
they see a 19 year-old female.
They see her.
They see XX chromosome.
I’m reminded of a verse
in Galatians 2 that says,
“I no longer live,
someone else
“is living in me.
And the life I now live,
I live by faith.”
She saved my life.
Oh really?
She saved my life; I almost
died of leukemia.
She’s my bone marrow donor.
There she is.
John 17:3 says:
“And this is eternal life,
“knowing you (God)
and Jesus Christ
whom you have sent.”
I am fully convinced
of the claims of Jesus,
as a skeptical person
and as an illusionist.
I know the God of the universe
has brought me
behind the curtain as I asked him.
Cancer was how he did it
through my life,
and there’s a spiritual cancer
that is eating us away
on the inside and we all long for,
we are begging for someone
to step in
and save us from that condition.
God looks at your heart
and God sees
that you have
a spiritual heart disease.
And that spiritual heart disease
is called sin.
We are all sinners, which means
we have all broken
God’s laws,
we have disobeyed God.
We have rebelled against God;
and because we have rebelled,
we will have to face a judgment.
Oh, yes, a judgment is coming;
one of these days
you will stand before God
on the Great Judgment Day
and you’ll have to give an account
for your life.
You’ll have to give an account
for what you did
with Jesus Christ this very night,
because there will be a judgment.
But God’s judgment
is also tempered by his love
and mercy.
He is willing to forgive you tonight,
to give you a chance tonight.
No matter how much time
you’ve wasted in the past
you can still have a tomorrow.
My goal was to be famous.
To fill my pride and emptiness
with the applause of the people.
They invited me to participate
in a Christian event
on the Island of Puerto Rico.
When I walked through
the door for the rehearsal,
I found myself in an environment
I had not experienced
in a long time, since my childhood.
I remember when I entered
that auditorium,
that the light in that place
collided with my darkness.
I began trembling uncontrollably.
And when the rehearsal ended,
I sat in my car
and said: “Okay, God, if you exist,
“if you are interested in me,
“if all that they say in the Bible
is true,
you have until tonight
to prove it to me.”
That night,
an unknown woman came to me
who knew so many things
about my life.
And God gave me the chance
to recognize that the desires
of my heart were motivated by
self-destructive instincts,
and she told me: “You have two
roads to choose from today.”
She enabled me
to have a reaction
and an encounter in my soul,
a violent collision with the truth
that I needed His presence
more than anything else.
My heart shouted,
“I can’t live without you,
you are my father
and I need you!”
Some of you think you are too bad
to come to God,
have done too many things,
and gone too far.
God isn’t waiting to judge you.
God isn’t waiting to condemn you.
God loves you.
He sent his Son to die on the cross
for you.
To shed his blood for you.
He wants to put his arms around you
and receive you.
And he will carry you and forgive you
and love you, and be your friend.
If I suffered so much from
the death of my father,
imagine how much a father
suffers from the death of his child.
He did that for me.
He sent Jesus
so I could be adopted
through His blood.
♪ Abba, my Father ♪
In the midst
of my worst circumstances,
He was going to find a way
to get my attention.
Though I was angry when I
opened the door
of my heart,
He understood my need of him
was far greater than that rebellion.
♪ Great God of glory,
strength, and power ♪
♪ You shake heaven and earth♪
♪ Oh, hallelujah, hosanna to the King,
blessed Redeemer♪
♪ I will always adore you ♪
♪ Abba, my Father ♪
He loves me, and to know that such
a powerful and majestic God
is not only the King of all creation,
but also my Father…
In Romans chapter 6 it says:
“For the wages of sin is death,
“but the gift
of God is eternal life
through
Jesus Christ our Lord.”
In 1 Peter it says: “He himself bore
our sins in his own body on the tree,
that we, having died to sins,
might live for righteousness.”
He became sin, think about it.
Jesus Christ, as pure and wonderful
as he is…
The greatest person,
the holiest person that ever lived…
The Son of the Living God,
became sin.
He had never known sin
and he became guilty
at that moment of adultery.
He became guilty
of lying, of idolatry.
He became guilty of every ugly,
dirty thing you can think of
because it was your sins
poured out on him.
Through Christ, we can have the most
fundamental relationship in life restored.
You say,
“Billy, what do I have to do?”
First, you must
repent of your sins.
The Apostle Peter said, “Repent ye
therefore, and be converted,
that your sins be blotted out.”
What does repentance mean?
Repentance means you come
to God and say,
“God, I’m sorry I’ve sinned.”
And we are all guilty.
Every one of us.
Everyone that’s ever
been born is guilty.
Have you repented?
Are you sure of it?
It means you not only say,
“God, I’m sorry.”
It means you ask him to help you
to turn from your sins
and change your way of living.
To get rid of those old habits.
And then you must come by faith,
because without faith,
it is impossible to please God.
The word “faith” means you trust fully.
The Bible says in Romans 4,
“But to him that worketh not,
but believeth on him that
justifieth the ungodly,
his faith is counted
for righteousness.”
I need righteousness to enter heaven,
and I don’t have any.
Billy Graham is a sinner.
I have
no righteousness of my own.
I come in the righteousness
of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Then the Bible says:
“For by grace are ye saved,
through faith…not by works
lest any man should boast.”
If you could work
your way to heaven,
you would go up to heaven and boast
to everybody, “Look what I did.
I was a good person,
I got here on my own.”
But no, you will only get there
because of Christ.
The fact that time is short calls
for us to do something about it now.
Because the Scriptures say in
2 Corinthians 6:2,
“Now is the accepted time.”
Not tomorrow.
Today, today, if you hear his voice
harden not your heart.
You hear a message like this
and it can be very dangerous
because you’ll harden your heart
and the next time you hear the Gospel,
your heart
will be harder and harder.
Come to Christ now.
If there’s even a whisper
in your heart
that you need to come,
come and say, Lord,
You have all of me tonight.
I want to be sure
I’m ready to meet you.
Come to me,
come to me, come to me.
If you want to receive Christ,
you can say a prayer like I did.
Like I did.
Like I did.
Dear God, I am a sinner.
I’m sorry for my sins.
I want to turn from my sins.
I believe Jesus Christ is your Son.
I believe that Jesus died for my sins
and that you raised him to life.
I want to trust Jesus Christ as
my Savior and follow Him
as my Lord,
from this day forward.
Jesus, I put my trust in you.
I surrender my life to you.
Please come into my life.
Fill me with your Holy Spirit.
I pray this in the name of Jesus.
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.
“Everyone who calls on the name
of the Lord will be saved.”
−Romans 10:13.
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