Doris Payne is a sweet, 88-year-old grandmother. She’s also an international jewel thief. Doris started stealing jewelry since the 1950s, and for more than 60 years, she is believed to have stolen $2 million in jewels. Over the years, she has travelled to jewelry stores from Monte Carlo to Tokyo and walked out with valuable gems. After she was caught, she said, “I have no remorse. Why? I ain’t killed nobody. I never took anything I regretted. I had a good look at it and decided this is what I want. And I kept it.”
But, just looking at Doris, you’d never think she was a notorious thief.
It’s funny but, just looking at Judas Iscariot, none of the disciples ever suspected him of being a thief, but John 12:6 says that Judas was a thief. (It makes you wonder what Judas ever did with the money he stole.)
People like to speculate who the antichrist is, but, in truth, you just never know who he might turn out to be. If he is in the world today, perhaps just looking at him, you’d never suspect him of being the antichrist.
Just imagine being so close to a desperate criminal, and not even knowing it. That sounds ‘creepy,’ and yet, it’s here that we find a strange verse in the Bible: Jer. 17:9, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
So, there you have it – we’re all desperate criminals. But if someone just looked at us, they’d never know that our hearts are desperate criminals. But God knows – and that’s all that matters. And THIS is why we need to keep surrendering our hearts to the Lord every day and ask Him to keep forming Jesus within us.