As I lay here awake in the early hours of the morning after
a run I can’t help but think about our country.
I look at several posts online about things that are going on in our
nation and the only thing I can pray is, “Lord, please heal our nation.” Nothing else needs to be said. And I’m not talking about healing our nation
of diseases like cancer and any other physical ailment, those are horrible and
I would like to see people healed from them, but I am talking about something
even bigger than that. Our nation needs
to be healed from the spiritual sickness we are suffering from. This sickness is so advanced that we as a
nation are almost spiritually dead.
I know that there are millions of people in this country
that truly love God, but even we are sick.
How has the church in America allowed the nation to go down the path of
destruction that we have traveled so far?
How have we gotten to the point of so much hatred and disdain for fellow
man that young men will go into a school and kill beautiful little
children? How has the hatred of truth
and light become so prevalent that we allow there to be no accountability in
every level of government? How are
people leaving the faith in droves to live a life of
self-above-all-others? The blame falls
on people like me.
A few years ago I wrote a blog based on a song called
“Camouflage Soul”. It was about how we
as Christians tend to allow our faith to blend in with our surroundings. Romans 12:2 was the main scripture
focus. It reads: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve
what God’s will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Now even though I wrote that blog a few years
ago, I still do not live as boldly for the Lord as I should, as I would
like. But I think it goes beyond that
even. Over the last few decades the
public has risen up against the Church.
We as the body have been shouted down by people in the media, Hollywood,
even in the courts and government. Now
is it an all-out war against Christianity?
Not yet. We do not get locked up
or executed for our faith. If you
believe the Bible, that day will come, but it’s not now. No when it seemed our neighbors were against
us in mass, we retreated to the safety of our Church walls. We venture out on covert recon missions, and
even wage small scale battles. But I do
not feel the Church, the body of Christ as a whole, has been standing on the
front line boldly proclaiming God’s message.
Over the years we have stood by silently so much that some have even
began to join the fight for things that are blatantly against God and His
will. We have Church leaders that stand
up and fight for sin and the right to commit them. We have believers that engage in debate in
online forums and spew absolute filth.
There is so much anger and vitriol in their words that the love of Jesus
cannot be seen or felt; when we do have someone that stands up for the truth,
there is not much force behind them. It
is like the enemy is firing mortar rounds, and they are lobbing water balloons
in retaliation. We as a nation have
leaders in place that lack honesty, integrity, or accountability. We as believers continue to voting for them
and not demanding more from them. We
have teachers that indoctrinate our children to worldly ideas. They plant the seeds at a very early age that
grow into ideas that are antithetical to Biblical teachings. But what do we expect? Since the church has taken a soft handed
approach to fighting the devil and his army of lies, he has marched his lines
right to the church’s front doors. Every
sin is becoming mainstream, and it is considered hate to say otherwise. Prayer has been banned from school functions;
the very mention of the God of the Bible is not allowed, but we have classes
that teach and promote the ideas of Islam.
The Ten Commandments are being removed from court houses and other
government buildings. The “leaders” in
Washington are bowing to winds of political correctness, and not wanting to
push Judeo-Christian principals on people.
But now the enemy is making his way into the church buildings by using
laws that force the support of sin on the Church. I just read yesterday that there are
“scholars” that are rewriting the Bible to change the language used towards
homosexuality. They are calling it the
“Queen James Bible”. And the Church lobs
another water balloon. Leaders don’t
want the IRS to come down on them and take away their tax exempt status. They don’t want to be labeled by the world as
hatemongering judgmental hypocrites.
They choose to look to the world for guidance on how to run their
congregations, but ignore what Jesus said.
I think the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 are very
relevant today. In the letter to the
Church at Ephesus, Jesus is saying that he sees the good works that they are
doing but that they have lost the love they once had. I think it’s the letter to the Church of
Laodicea that is the most convicting. He
nails them on their complacency. He says
they are neither hot nor cold, and that since they are lukewarm he is going to
spit them out of His mouth. In verse 17
of chapter 3 Jesus says, “But you do not realize that you are wretched,
pitiful, poor, blind and naked.” Has the
church as a whole become lukewarm? Are
we blind to that fact? Are we telling
the world, even ourselves, that we are fine?
That we are rich in love and works, but are really just middle of the
road dwellers that Jesus is waiting to spew out of His mouth? Perhaps, if the entire church body was banded
together and showing the true love of Jesus, the world would look a lot
different. I’m not talking about going
out and hitting people on the head with our Bibles, condemning them for their
sins, and then claiming ‘Jesus loves you’.
This did not work in the ‘70s, ‘80s, or ‘90s. I’m pretty sure it won’t work now. What we need is the love that Jesus spoke
about in Matthew 22. The word in both
verse 37 and verse 39 are the same: ‘agapao’.
This is a verb that means to welcome, to be fond of, to love dearly a
person. Verse 37 says to love the Lord
your God with all of your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
mind. Verse 39 says to love your
neighbor as yourself. This is an action
of love that is supposed to go UP to God in Heaven, IN to us, and OUT to our
neighbors. This love is the exact same
love that is used in John 3:16: ‘For God so loved the world, that He sent His
only begotten Son, that whoever
believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.’ This is a love of sacrifice. God, who the Bible says loved us while we
were still sinners, sacrificed His Son on our behalf just so we could be saved
and live with Him in eternity. That is a
HUGE sacrifice for some pretty mean and ugly people that spit in His face on a
daily basis. To love God with all of our
heart, soul, and mind is a sacrifice on our part, but it does not stop
there. We have to accept the love that
God pours out on us, we have to accept that and love ourselves with same love
and adoration that He has for us, and then we have to turn around and love
everyone we come in contact with the same way.
If we can’t love ourselves, we cannot truly accept God’s love for us,
and we certainly project that love onto others.
If we claim to love ourselves, but can’t love others, we aren’t grasping
that love of God either. This is a love
triangle, so to speak, of epic proportions.
The part of the equation that is constant is God’s love. We mess the rest up. That is where we get off track and the world
gets the way it is today. If we are
truly loving God, ourselves, and others with this type of sacrificial love, lives
can and will be changed.
