Category: Political Economic Interests

by Eugene Peterson …   Psalm 132 explained.

I was recently introduced to the author Eugene Peterson by my friend Chuck so I ordered the four books he suggested but have only completed three so far savoring them like quality ice cream after an tasty meal (actually ice cream is welcome here anytime) .  And to think I had been incorrectly assuming all along, he had only written The Message! No longer! I find it noteworthy and indicative of the wordsmith he was, that Peterson once commandeered a key word phrase associated with atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche – that the only way to live life is to find a standard and stick to it – and repurposed it to be about following Jesus nonetheless! Peterson literally stole the nonbeliever’s catchphrase, “a long obedience in the same direction,” and made it the name of his own best-selling Christian book first released in 1980. What makes Peterson’s message so unique today is he exudes the bedrock transformation offered only by Jesus Christ, whereas many believers today tend to view the Nietzsche and Marxist deception as smoke and mirrors leading to death. Take note for The Message, his paraphrase of the Bible, has transformed the dusty, ancient Christian scriptures into imaginative literature for contemporary readers seeking truth.

While I was reading this chapter 14 (which I’ve summarized below – now with the Preface (verbatim) over 2300 words long; perhaps you can read it in installments while rationing out your ice cream) when I just laughed out loud thoroughly enjoying the lead off hospital incident. The truths of his Kelly parable and the pollster’s definitive “frivolous” report resonates with me as I too at times can mistake a sore throat for a descent into hell.(“Peterson, pray for me!”) Perhaps the best possible antidote is when we can combine an accurate memory of God’s ways with a lively hope in his promises, the essence of Psalm 132.

20^th– Anniversary Preface.. verbatim, not summarized.

As I sat down to revise A Long Obedience In The Same Direction I was prepared to do a lot of changing. I have hardly done any. It turns out there are some things that just don’t change. God doesn’t change: He seeks and He saves. And our response to God as He reveals himself in Jesus doesn’t change: we listen and we follow. Or we don’t. When we are dealing with the basics – God and our need for God – we are at bedrock. We start each day at the beginning with no frills.

So the book comes out in this new edition substantially as I first wrote it. I added an epilogue to reaffirm the ways in which Scripture and prayer fuse to provide energy and direction to those of us who set out to follow Jesus. A few celebrity names have been replaced by new ones (celebrities change pretty rapidly!), and I have changed a few references to current affairs. But that’s about it. It is reassuring to realize once again that we don’t have to anxiously study the world around us in order to keep up with God and his ways with us.

The most conspicuous change has been the use of a fresh translation of the Holy Scriptures, The Message, that I have been working on continuously since the publication of A Long Obedience. In fact, the fifteen Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120-134) that provide the text here for developing “discipleship in an instant society” provided the impetus for embarking on the new translation. All I had in mind at first was translating the Psalms into idiomatic North American language that I heard people using on the streets and in the shopping malls and at football games. I knew that following Jesus could never develop into a “long obedience” without a deepening prayer life and that the Psalms had always been the primary means by which Christians learned to pray everything they lived, and live everything they prayed over the long haul (No wonder I missed the boat spiritually so long. Only recently did I begin to read the Psalms).

But the people I was around didn’t pray the Psalms. That puzzled me; Christians have always prayed the Psalms; and why didn’t my friends and neighbors? Then I realized it was because the language, cadenced and beautiful and harmonious, seemed remote from their jerky and messy and discordant everyday lives. I wanted to translate these fifteen Psalms from their Hebrew original and convey the raw, rough and robust energy that is so characteristic of these prayers. I wanted people to start praying them again, not just admiring them from a distance, and thereby learn to pray everything they experienced and felt and thought as they followed Jesus, not just what they thought was proper to pray in church.

And so it happened that the unintended consequence of the writing of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction was this new translation of the Song of the Ascents, and then all the Psalms and then the NT and eventually the whole Bible. The inclusion of that translation in this new edition completes the book in a way I could not have anticipated twenty years ago.

Chapter 14. Obedience: How He Promised God

 “True knowledge of God is born out of obedience.” John Calvin

An incident took place a few years ago that has acquired the force of a parable for me. I had a minor operation on my nose and was in my hospital room recovering. Even though the surgery was minor, the pain was great and I was full of misery. Late in the afternoon a man was assigned to the other bed in my room. He was to have a tonsillectomy the next day. He was young, about twenty-two years old, good looking and friendly. He came over to me, put out his hand and said, “ Hi, my name is Kelly. What happened to you?”

I was no mood for friendly conversation, did not return the handshake,  grunted my name and said that I had gotten my nose broken. He got the message that I did not want to talk, pulled the curtain between our beds and let me alone. Later in the evening his friends were visiting, and I heard him say, “There’s a man in the next bed who is a prizefighter; He got his nose broken in a championship fight.” He went on to embellish the story for the benefit of his friends.

Later in the evening, as I was feeling better, I said, “Kelly, you misunderstood what I said. I’m not a prizefighter. The nose was broken years ago in a basketball game, and I am just now getting it fixed.”

“Well, what do you do then?”

“I’m a pastor.”

“Oh.” he said and turned away; I was no longer an interesting subject.

In the morning he awoke me: “Peterson, Peterson – wake up.” I groggily came awake and asked what he wanted. “I want you to pray for me; I’m scared.” And so, before he was taken to surgery, I went to his bedside and prayed for him.

When he was brought back a couple of hours later, a nurse came and said, “Kelly, I am going to give you an injection that should take care of any pain you might have.”

In twenty minutes or so he began to groan, “I hurt. I can’t stand it. I’m going to die.”

I rang for the nurse and, when she came, said “Nurse, I don’t think that shot did any good; why don’t you give him another one?” She didn’t acknowledge my credentials for making such a suggestion, told me curtly that she would oversee the medical care of the patient, turned on her heel and, a little too abruptly I thought, left. Meanwhile Kelly continued to vent his agony.

After another half hour he began to hallucinate, and having lost touch with reality, began to shout, “Peterson, pray for me; can’t you see I’m dying! Peterson, pray for me!” His shouts brought the nurses, doctors, and orderlies running. They held him down and quieted him with the injection I had prescribed earlier.

The parabolic force of the incident is this: when the man was scared he wanted me to pray for him, and when the man was crazy he wanted me to pray for him, but in between, during the hours of so-called normalcy, he didn’t want anything to do with a pastor. What Kelly betrayed in extremis is all many people today know of religion: 1.) religion is to help them with their fears but that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of; 2.) religion is made of moments of craziness but those are remote and shadowy in the clear light of the sun and routines of every day. In fact, I believe the most religious places in the world are not churches but battlefields and mental hospitals. You are much more likely to find passionate prayer in a foxhole than in a church pew, and you will certainly find more otherworldly visions and supernatural voices in a mental hospital than you will in church.

Stable, Not Petrified

Nevertheless we Christians don’t go to either place to nurture our faith. We don’t deliberately put ourselves in places of fearful danger, and we don’t put ourselves in psychiatric wards so we can be around those who clearly see visions of heaven and hell and distinctly hear the voice of God. What most Christians do is come to church, a place that is fairly safe and moderately predictable. For we have an instinct for health and sanity in our faith. We don’t seek our death-defying situations, and we avoid mentally unstable teachers. But in doing that we don’t get what some people want very much, a religion that makes us safe at all costs, certifying us as inoffensive to our neighbors and guaranteeing us as good risks to the banks. We want a Christian faith that has stability but is not petrified, that has vision but is not hallucinatory. How do we get both a sense of stability and a spirit of adventure, the ballast of good health and the zest of true sanity? How do we get the adult maturity to keep our feet on the ground and retain the childlike innocence to make the leap of faith?

What would you think of a pollster who issued a definitive report on how the American people felt about a new television special, if we discovered later that he had interviewed only one person who had seen only ten minutes of the program? We would dismiss the conclusions as frivolous. Yet that is exactly the kind of evidence that too many Christians accept as the final truth about many much more important matters-matters such as answered prayer, God’s judgment, Christ’s forgiveness, eternal salvation. The only person they consult is themselves, and the only experience they evaluate is their most recent ten minutes. But we need other experiences, particularly the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the Church and our local congregation, as well as the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors. A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experiences of the past week. (clearly a choice definitive sentence! merlin)

A Christian with a defective memory has to start everything from scratch and spends far too much of his or her time backtracking, repairing, perhaps even starting over. A Christian with a good memory avoids repeating old sins, knows the easiest way through complex situations and instead of starting over each day continues what was begun in Adam.

You ever notice for all its interest in history the Bible never refers to the past as “the good old days.” The past is not, for the person of faith, a restored historical site that we tour when we are on vacation; it is a field we plow, disc, harrow and plant, fertilize, lovingly work to insure a bountiful harvest.

Christians who master Psalm 132 will be protected from one danger, at least, that is always a threat to our obedience: the danger that we should reduce our Christian existence to ritually obeying a few commandments that are congenial to our temperament and convenient to our standard of living. It gives us, instead, a vision into the future so that we can see what is right before us. If we define the nature of our lives by our mistake of the moment, or the defeat of the hour, or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give our obedience ballast and breadth just as we need a vision of the future to give our obedience both direction and goal.

If we never learn to do this – to extend the boundaries of our lives beyond the dates merely enclosed by our birth and death, and actually acquire an understanding and appreciation of God’s way as something larger and more complete than those anecdotes in our private diaries – we will forever be missing the point of things, by making headlines out of something that ought to be tucked away on page 97 in section C of the newspaper, or putting into the classified ads something that should be getting a full page color advertisement – perhaps mistaking a sore throat for a descent into hell! (“Peterson, pray for me!”) For Christian faith is a full revelation of a vast creation and a grandly consummated redemption. I prefer to define my faith, or your faith, by witnessing our obedient actions in the same direction, as led by the Holy Spirit

Christian living demands that we keep our feet on the ground, but it also asks us to make a leap of faith. A Christian who stays put is no better than a statue, waiting to be pulled down when the tides change. A person who leaps about constantly is under suspicion of being not a man but a jumping jack or worse. Our obedience requires we possess the strength to stand as well as a willingness to leap, and the good sense to know when to do which. Which is exactly what we get when our accurate memory of God’s ways are combined with a lively hope in his promises.         

So what if we do possess “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction” if the big “O” (obedience) is predominately “cultural” and has not been “visibly transformational” for a century or two and just perhaps there are persons within and without, that tell us we’ve lost our way? One thing is certain though. if strife and chaos either emerges or invades, unknown leaders will be born as the flames rise and the love of Christ will be witnessed by the masses before the ashes cool. And some leaders may well die for their obedient actions. And some of His witnesses among the masses may be sacrificed. But rejoice that the exiting witnesses will directly enter Glory! But do pray for the millions of the masses who know not God and are ignorant of His Ways.

The blood of the martyrs has always built the Church. Martyrdom has been happening around the world for centuries. Our communities may no longer be exempt. Believers may even become endangered species. Prepare your heart, your mind, and your soul for the battle of your life. And rejoice abundantly in the event our country and the world is granted a reprieve from the imminent strife and chaos all about us; simply more time for believers to prepare and be a witness to the lost masses of the Hope that lies within us.

Peace does not mean to be merely in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart, which is only possible by centering on Christ’s love for you.

Leaders don’t force people to follow. They merely invite them to join them on their journey to Glory.

Think about this. A true leader does not lead with the intent to only create followers, BUT with the intent to create an abundance of more Leaders!

Leaders become great leaders not because of THEIR power, BUT because of their ability to spiritually EMPOWER others!

Next Up: YouTube of Pastor Carl’s Sermon Sunday past On Being Blessed… And Oh, Are We Ever!! Start at 32:00 minutes for the reading of the text…

Last week I listened to nationally syndicated radio host and columnist Michael Brown’s handbook “Saving A Sick America,” (SASA) a biblically-based moral and cultural renaissance, revealing that the key for the inspiration and guidance necessary for a moral and cultural revolution for recapturing America’s greatness consists in returning to our spiritual and moral roots.

And yes indeed, at first blush, this book too appears to be just one more of the thousands continually appearing for decades now. But from my perhaps yet immature perspective as a blogger, I’ve already realized effective sustainable life change do not occur easily without significant reorientation of our perspectives and desires. And I particularly found Chapter Twelve in SASA titled “Putting An End To The Blame Game & Saying Goodbye To The Entitlement Mentality,” as a key document for exploration. But may I remind us as readers, since we are all to encourage and mentor others in various capacities every day, perhaps this has a wider application than I originally considered, therefore I am sharing it with you. Even though I spent considerable time attempting to condense this eleven page chapter, this document is still nearly 3000 words long. Make no mistake! This document remains a chapter. Pace your reading accordingly!

Ecclesiastes 1: 9–10 Tells us there is nothing new under the sun. The problems and challenges we face today, although packaged differently than in past centuries, are the same problems and challenges experienced by previous generations. We have the same fears, desires, lusts, loves, hopes, and dreams, whether we live in the 21^st -century A.D. or the 21^st – century BC. This is another reason God‘s word is so amazingly relevant: Our Maker knows us better than we know ourselves, and the sins and the shortcomings and the weaknesses of our forefathers, going all the way back to the garden of Eden – are our sins and shortcomings and weaknesses today. In many ways, we are just like Adam and Eve.

Let’s go back then, to the beginning, to an earthly paradise called the garden of Eden. We know the story all too well. Eve was deceived by the serpent, and she ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, giving the fruit to her husband Adam, who also ate of it. This is what is known as the fall of man.

Immediately, Adam and Eve were conscious of their nakedness. Before that they had the innocence of little children and were one unaware they were unclothed. Now they had to cover up. For the first time they also experienced guilt and fear. They hid from the presence of the Lord, whose commandments they had violated. They also learned to make excuses and pass the buck. The narrative in Genesis 3 is remarkable:

Then the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He replied, “I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.“

“Who told you that you were naked? “asked the Lord God. “Have you eaten from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat?“

The man replied, “It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it.“

Then the Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?“

“The serpent deceived me, “she replied. “That’s why I ate it.” (v. 9–13 NLT)

This sounds just like you and me: “Lord, it’s not my fault! Someone else is to blame!“

When God confronted Adam, the man in essence replied, “It is not my fault! It was that woman that you gave me. She is guilty. And for the record, I never asked you for a companion. That was all your idea. You are the one who put her in the garden with me, so in reality, you’re the one responsible for what I did.”

When God confronted Eve she replied, “It is not my fault! The snake tricked me! And just for the record, although I’m not actually saying it out loud, you were the one who put that deceiver in the garden with me. Otherwise, I would never thought of disobeying you. Not in a million years. So, if there’s anyone to blame here, it’s you for putting that arch deceiver right in my own backyard.”

How did God respond? First, he pronounced a curse on the snake, then on the woman, then on the man (Genesis 3:14-19). Everyone is responsible before the Lord, and excuses evaporate in his presence. The blame game doesn’t work before an all-seeing God. To paraphrase the old joke, you can’t kill your parents and then plead for leniency from the court because you’re an orphan. Not in God’s court!

The Lord calls us to take responsibility for our actions, refusing to entertain her fragile excuses. This is something you find throughout the Gospels, where Jesus, who was so full of compassion and long-suffering and kindness and tenderness, showed no tolerance for excuses. He cut through them like a knife cuts through butter. He exposes them for what they were: empty words used to cover up the lack of willingness. That’s why, when Jesus was on the earth, he didn’t trust himself to people, “because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man” (John  2:24–25). He also knew that there was nothing new under the sun when it came to the human race.

When, in response to Jesus command to “follow me, “the man said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father,“ Jesus replied, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as  for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God“ (Luke 9:59-60).

The fact is that Jesus was sensitive, and he was committed to honoring one’s parents (see especially Mark 7:1-13). But he saw through this man’s excuse, recognizing that the man was procrastinating. Today Jesus might seem harsh and uncaring. He is hardly like the Jesus we hear preached from our pulpits these days. The contemporary Jesus would never hurt any one’s feelings like this. But that, of course, is one of the big differences between the real Jesus – the Jesus of the Scriptures who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, (Heb 13:8) – and the modern, fairy tale version of Jesus.

It is absolutely true that we are saved by grace, not by works, and that eternal life is a gift. But Paul also made clear that with grace came responsibility, writing, “I therefore a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (Ephesian 4:1). And “Therefore I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a sacrifice – alive, holy, and pleasing to God – which is your reasonable service. Do not be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may test and approve what is the will of God – what is good and well pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:1-2).

Paul also had no places for empty excuses, telling the believers in Rome that “each of us will give an account of himself to God” and explaining to the believers in Corinth that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” Rom. 14:12; II Corinthians 5:10).

These are sobering words. As children of God, we will give account to our Father one day, not to determine if we are saved or lost but to determine our future rewards.

It is true that he is for us, not against us; that he desires to bless, not curse; that there is no condemnation for those who are in Messiah Jesus; that Christ himself is our advocate, which means he is pleading our cause. Therefore we submit to the Lord out of love rather than cower before him in servile fear. This means we will take responsibility for our sins, which is something else we don’t hear about too often these days. As a Christian apologist Jeremiah Johnson observed, instead of repentance we hear “a lot of talk about brokenness and negativity, as if Christ humbled Himself to the point of death to cure depression and fix bad attitudes. The modern church has largely done away with the biblical language of sin and salvation, replacing it with gooey postmodern verbiage that appeals to a generation raised on psychobabble and self-help seminars.“

Johnson then quoted Pastor John MacArthur:

That kind of thinking has all but driven words like sin, repentance, contrition, atonement, restitution, and redemption out of public discourse. If no one is supposed to feel guilty, how could anyone be a sinner? Modern culture has the answer: people are victims. Victims are not responsible for what they do; they are casualties of what happens to them. So every human failing must be described in terms of how the perpetrator has been victimized. We are all supposed to be “sensitive“ and “compassionate“ enough to see that the very behaviors we used to label “sin“ are  actually evidence of victimization.

Victimization has gained so much influence that as far as society is concerned, there is practically no such thing as sin anymore. Anyone can escape responsibility for his or her wrongdoing simply by claiming the status of a victim. It has radically changed the way our society looks at human behavior.

We are not sinners anymore; we are morally challenged. We don’t break God‘s commandments; we have a disease. We are not wicked; we are weak. And above all, we’re not guilty, since guilt implies responsibility and God knows we are not responsible. Someone else is to blame!

The bottom line is this: if you want to grow spiritually, if you want to become mature, if you want to fulfill your God-given destiny, then adopt a no-excuses policy for your life.

You alone are responsible for your success or failure, and the quicker you learn to embrace this way of thinking, the quicker you will make progress – real, discernible progress. No one will be able to stop you from living a productive, meaningful life, and every stumbling block will become a steppingstone. His grace will empower you as you give yourself to him.

It is true that people often hurt us and that circumstances are often against us, and many times we do suffer because of other people‘s sins and negligence and misdeeds. But making excuses will make things worse, not better, while shifting the blame will not provide you with the single constructive solution.

But there is one more step to take if you really want to swim against the tide in today’s society, and so I encourage you to embrace this attitude as well: nobody owes me anything, and I’m not “entitled“ to a wonderful life. Unfortunately, many Americans hold the exact opposite of this belief, and this crippling entitlement mentality dominates much of our nation today. It is the mindset that says, “Society owes me a better life.“

Conservapedia.com defines entitlement mentality as a “a state of mind in which an individual comes to believe that privileges are instead rights, and they are to be expected as a matter of course.“ In the words of Alethea Luna, “a sense of entitlement is established upheld by the belief that we are the center of the universe, and if the universe doesn’t meet our needs and desires, all hell will break loose.“

According to Conservapedia.com, entitlement mentality is characterized by:

1.) A lack of appreciation for the sacrifices of others

2.)Lack of personal responsibility 

3.)An inability to accept that actions carry consequences

4.) Increased dependency on the Nanny state big government intervention, and expectation that the government will intervene to solve personal problems. Upon losing a job, for instance, someone with an entitlement mentality is likely to turn to the government for unemployment handouts rather than immediately seeking another job.

5.) Ignorance of the Bill of Rights. Those within entitlement mentality frequently imagine so-called rights that are in no way guaranteed – for instance, the “right to employment,“ or the “right to not be offended” or “the “right to healthcare.” Moreover, they misinterpret the Declaration of Independence’s affirmation of their right to pursue happiness as a Constitutional guarantee of happiness.

6.) Support for wholesale expansion of Welfare state social programs as a cure all for perceived “injustice.”

Now, if we go back to the garden, back to Adam and Eve, we can see that the entitlement mentality is the flip side of the blame shifting mentality. Blame-shifting says I’m not responsible for my failure; someone else is,“ while entitlement says, “I’m not responsible for improving my situation; someone else is.” Either way, someone else is to blame for my current situation, and if I don’t find myself where I want to be today, it’s someone else’s fault.

This dangerous attitude is crippling a whole generation, but once again, this attitude is nothing new. It is just greatly on the rise in our day. As expressed by Kate S Rourke, “Children in the most recent generation of adults born between 1982 and 1995, known as ‘Generation Y,’ were raised to believe that it is their right to have everything given to them more than any other previous generation.” This mind-set has been here before; it has just become much worse.

Once again, God‘s word has a major word of correction and redirection for us today. Entitlement mentality is destroying our culture and hurting a whole generation. The Bible’s directive to take full responsibility for our lives and quit making excuses is just what we need.

Notice the admonition in the Ephesians 4:28, “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.” And now since the former thief is also a follower of Jesus, he is working not only to make a living, but he is working to have extra money to help those in need. This is the complete crucifixion of the entitlement mentality. Others are not responsible for me; I am responsible for others.

I believe the entitlement mentality is one of the greatest strongholds in our society today. It undercuts initiative, encourages apathy, and discourages visionary sacrifice. Worst of all, it is so deeply in bedded that we’re not even conscious of it, making it harder to resist and overcome. But resist it and overcome it we must. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck on a merry-go-round of blame shifting and victim hood, getting angry, pointing our fingers, making accusations, and going nowhere.

Jesus gives us three practical principles in Luke 16:

1.) “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much“ (v.10). You will not be trusted with much until you prove yourself trustworthy with very little. In my early days of radio broadcasting when I was on the few smaller stations, I said to the Lord, “If you will give me a million listeners a day, I’ll make this the best radio show possible.” No sooner did I say the words that I knew what his answer would be: “Make this the best show possible, and I will give you a million listeners.”. 

2.) If you’re not faithful with money (what Jesus calls “the unrighteous wealth“), you won’t be faithful with true riches. (v.11). Many of us want to be spiritual heroes, but our earthly lives are a wreck due to our own irresponsibility, particularly when it comes to handling money. Of course, God doesn’t expect all of us to be financial wizards, but he does require us to be good financial stewards, and that means paying our bills on time, being generous, and being wise.

3.) “And if you’ve not been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?“ The principal again is simple: If you are irresponsible with the things that don’t belong to you, caring for them as if they were your own, then you’ll never be entrusted with things that are your own. If you don’t care take care of your parent’s car when they loan it to you, you’re not ready for a car of your own.

In summary, the bigger the stakes, the more our good habits (and bad habits) will be magnified. So, faithful with a little, faithful with much; faithful with earthy riches, faithful with spiritual riches; faithful with that which belongs to someone else, faithful with that which belongs to you.

None of this is rocket science but once again, that’s what is so wonderful about God‘s Word. It is as practical as it is profound and as pragmatic as it is penetrating. The Word of God is wise, and we do well to live by the wisdom of the Word. And the word of God destroys the entitlement mentality, giving us something far better in its place.

Dr. John Townsend wrote,

“There is a solution to entitlement, which I called the Hard Way. The Hard Way is the entitlement cure. It is a path of behaviors and attitudes that undo the negative effects of entitlement whether in ourselves or others.” This was his definition of the Hard Way: “The habit of doing what is best, rather than what is comfortable, to achieve a worthwhile outcome.“

It is the hard way that pays long-term dividends, the hard way that produces long-term fruit, the hard way that yields long-term gratification. So quit passing the buck and shirking responsibility; don’t blame others for where you find yourself today; and determine, with God’s help, to be a giver not a taker, a producer and not a drainer, one who lifts others up rather than drags them down. To quote Paul once again, “Do everything without complaining and arguing, so that no one can criticize you. Live clean, innocent lives as children of God shining like bright lights in a world full of crooked and perverse people” (Phil. 2:14-15 NLT).

That’s our calling, that’s who we are, and that’s who our nation needs us to be. So, let’s wake up from our slumber. It’s a literally time to rise and shine.

Next Up Sun 4/14: Snippets from Saturday Nights Live Bill Maher’s comments via Brad Jersak’s book “A More Christlike God, A More Beautiful Gospel.”

Letter to the American Church

Not to speak is to speak.

Not to act is to act.

God will not hold us guiltless.

Can it really be God’s will that His children be silent at a time like this? Decrying the cowardice that masquerades as godly meekness, Eric Metaxas summons the Church to battle.

The author of a bestselling biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Metaxas reveals the haunting similarities between today’s American Church and the German Church of the 1930s. Echoing the German martyrs’ prophetic call, he exhorts his fellow Christians to repent of their silence in the face of evil.

An attenuated and unbiblical “faith” based on what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” has sapped the spiritual vitality of millions of Americans. Paying lip service to an insipid “evangelism,” they shrink from combating the evils of our time. Metaxas refutes the pernicious lie that fighting evil politicizes Christianity. As Bonhoeffer and other heroes of the faith insisted, the Church has irreplaceable role in the culture of a nation. It is our duty to fight the powers of darkness, especially on behalf of the weak and vulnerable, well beyond the widow, orphan

            Silence is not an option. God calls us to defend the unborn, to confront the lies of cultural Marxism, and to battle the globalist tyranny that crushes human freedom. Confident that this is His fight, the Church must overcome fear and enter the fray, armed with the spiritual weapons of prayer, self-sacrifice, love, and focused on being the obedient, forgiven, transformed, empowered discipling Bond Servants of Jesus Christ until death permits retirement.

Eric Metaxas, author of fourteen books, including Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy; Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery; and If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty.

Introduction

I have written this book because I am convinced the American Church is at an impossibly – and almost unbearably – important inflection point. The parallels to where the German Church was in the 1930s are unavoidable and grim. So the only question – and what concerns us in this slim volume – is whether we might understand those parallels, and thereby avoid the fatal mistakes the German Church made during that time, and their superlatively catastrophic results. If we do not, I am convinced we will reap a whirlwind greater than the one they did.

            The German Church of the 1930s was silent in the face of evil; but can there be any question whether the American Church of our own time is guilty of the same silence? Because of this, I am compelled to speak out, and say what – only by God’s grace – I might say to make plain where we find ourselves at this moment, at our unavoidably crucial crossroads in history.

            It is for good or for ill that America plays an inescapably central role in the world. If you have not read Alexis de Tocqueville on this subject, you likely nonetheless understand that the extent to which that central role has been used for the good and God’s purposes has had everything to do with our churches, or with the American Church, as we may call her. So if America is in any way exceptional, it has nothing to do with the blood that runs through American veins and everything to do with the blood shed for us on Calvary, and the extent to which we have acknowledged this. America has led the world in making religious liberty paramount, knowing that this is only with a deep regard for it that we may speak of liberty at all. It was this that made Tocqueville marvel most: that while in other nations – and especially in his own nation of France – the Church was adamantly opposed to the idea of political liberty, in America it was the churches that helped, encourage, create, and sustain a culture of liberty.

            Because of the outsized role America plays in the world today, the importance of whether we learn the lesson of what happened to the German Church ninety years ago cannot be overstated. Though it may be a gruesome thing to consider, the monstrous evil that befell the civilized world precisely because of the German Church’s failure is likely a mere foretaste of what will befall the world if the American Church fails in a similar way at this hour.

            And at present we are failing.

            We should underscore the idea that the centrality of our nation in the world does not mean that we are intrinsically exceptional, but rather that God has sovereignly chosen us to hold the torch of liberty for all the world, and that the Church is central to our doing this. So the idea that He has charged us with this most solemn duty should make us tremble. Nonetheless, we must carry out that duty in a way that is the opposite of prideful and that is meant to be an invitation to all beyond our shores. If we should aspire – in the words of Jesus, as quoted by John Winthrop – to be a  ”shining city on a hill,” the idea is that we should exist and shine for the sake of others and not for ourselves alone.

President Abraham Lincoln said that we in America were God’s “almost chosen people,” and acknowledged this placed upon us an almost unbearable burden. It is certainty from the Scriptures and from our experience over the centuries that apart from God we can do nothing. So if God has chosen us for some task, we must do all we can to shoulder that task, and must know more than anything that unless we lean on Him and acknowledge Him in all our ways, we are guaranteed to fail.

            We must also remind ourselves that when God chooses anyone – whether the nation of Israel or a single person – to perform any role or any task, it is never to be celebrated, as though the one chosen has won a contest. So if the Lord Almighty has chosen America and the American Church to stand against the evils and deceptions of this present darkness, we had better be sure we understand what is required of us, and had better make sure we do all that is possible to fulfill our charge.

            Throughout this book I will touch on some issues we are facing, but let us say here that it is something almost unprecedented: the emergence of ideas and forces that ultimately are at war with God Himself. It’s easy to see this with regard to Germany in the 1930s, when we think of death camps and the murder of so many millions, but we need to understand that in the beginning they had no idea where it was leading, and had no idea they were facing nothing less than the forces of the anti-Christ. We are now facing those same forces in different guises. But the extent of it is even worse than it was ninety years ago, because these forces today do not have an agenda that is hyper-nationalistic, as in Germany, but that is actually anti-nationalistic – which is to say that is the globalist agenda.

            These ideas seemed to have emerged lately, but they have been growing quietly in our midst and we have not taken them seriously enough. Many have been fooled into thinking them essentially harmless. We are today like the proverbial frog in the saucepan, simmering along and never realizing that unless we see our situation and leap out now, we are very soon to be cooked and beyond all leaping. The ideas and forces we face have an atheistic Marxist ideology in common, although it never declares itself as such. It knows that doing this would wake up many people who are still asleep, and that would ruin everything.

            But what we must dare to see is that these many ideas share a bitter taproot that leads all the way to Hell. Critical Race Theory – which is atheistic and Marxist – and radical transgender and pro-abortion ideologies are all inescapably anti-God and anti-human. So they are dedicatedly at war with the ideas of family and marriage, and with the idea of America as a force for good – as a force for spreading the Gospel and Gospel values throughout the world. These atheistic  ideas have over many decades infiltrated our own culture in such a way that they touch everything, and part of what makes them so wicked is that they smilingly pretend to share the biblical values that champion the underdog against the oppressor. As Stalin and Hitler and Mao would butcher millions in the name of fighting for “the people,” so these forces do the same and are angling to do much, much more of the same – if we will allow them the time to strengthen themselves, if we do not fight with all our might against them right now.

            One of the principal ways in which they have gained strength is in persuading so many in the American Church that to fight them is to abandon the “Gospel” for pure culture warring or for politics. This is not just nonsense, but it is a supremely deceptive and satanic lie, designed only to silence those who would genuinely speak for truth. So those who behave as though there is nothing to worry about, who seem to think – as such prominent pastors as Andy Stanley and others do – that we ought to assiduously avoid fighting these threats and be “apolitical” are tragically mistaken, are burying their heads in the sand and exhorting others to do the same. Or to put it another way, they are in their churches singing more and more loudly to drown out the cries of those in the boxcars heading to their gruesome deaths. Sing with us, they say, and don’t worry about all of those other issues out there. They don’t concern us. Our job is to focus on God, and to pretend that we can do so without fighting for those He loves, whose lives and futures are being destroyed.

            So to restate our situation, this is not a task or duty we in the American Church have asked for. Nonetheless, just as the German Church had a painfully important task and did not rise to that occasion to perform it, so we have a painfully important task, whether we have asked for it or not. God calls us to do something, but the choice whether we do it is entirely ours. Because we are made in God’s image, we are perfectly free, and therefore cannot be compelled to do what is right. It is a chilling prospect, especially in light of the failure of the German Church.

            If anyone would feel that believing God has chosen the American Church for such a vital role somehow smacks of an egotistical nationalism, they have already bought into the Marxist and globalist lie that America is nothing special – or is probably a force for evil at this point. In any case, they miss the point and have only leapt away from one ditch to fall headlong into another. It is a fact that God in His sovereignty chose the German Church to stand against the evils of its day, but it shrank from acknowledging this and from standing. Germany has been living with deep shame over it unto this day. So for the American Church to say that God has not chosen us is as bad as saying He must choose because we deserve to be chosen. Both stances are equally guilty of the sin of pride. It is far easier to ignore God’s call than to acknowledge it and rise to fulfill it, but it is more difficult and painful than anything to live with the results of ignoring God’s call. Let the reader understand.

Table of Contents

Ch. 1  What Is the Church?

Ch. 2  Does God Ask Us to See the Future?

Ch. 3  “Unless You Repent”

Ch. 4  “The Church and the Jewish Question”

Ch. 5  12,000 Pastors

Ch. 6  The Spiral of Silence

Ch. 7  Two Errors of Faith

Ch. 8  The Church Paralyzed

Ch. 9  The Idol of Evangelism

Ch.10 Speaking the Truth in Love

Ch. 11 Be Ye Not Political

Ch. 12 Who Do You Say God Is?

Ch. 13 The Parable of the Talents

Ch. 14 Justifying Ourselves

Ch. 15 “Religionless Christianity”

Ch. 16 The Final Push

Accept His Love.  Live His Joy.  Grow His Fruit.  Embrace His Peace.  Share His Hope.  Refute Satan’s Evil.  merlin