God’s Mind on: The Vote

I am going to vote today. I will be traveling on November 4th so the Sweet Thing and I are going to vote early. I didn’t even now you could do such a thing till recently. It caused me to take some time to pause and pray this morning asking our father how he wants me to vote and on what does He wants me to make that decision.

I guess I am pretty sure who I will vote for, but I have been asking myself why. Frankly, neither ticket has really inspired me. Truly this is an incredibly tumultuous time on our nation’s history. Does God care who is president? But my biggest question is “why don’t we as American Christians pray more about this?” Be Honest with yourself. How much time have you really prayed about God’s will being done in the selection of this President as well as House of Representatives and Senate, and a host of local officials?

I must confess…I haven’t prayed much at all. I apologize to you my brothers and sisters for that neglect and sin. So what does God’s Word tell us about our citizenship responsibility? Let me share just a few things.

1. Rom. 13:1 ¶ Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. 

We are to obey the laws of the land in which we live. We are certainly a people with two citizenships. We are Americans and yet we are citizens of God’s Kingdom as well. As there is no authority in Heaven except appointed by God, there is no authority on earth except that which is established by God.

We must be a people of prayer….asking God to accomplish His purposes on this earth through our next Leaders. Perhaps it is because we failed to pray that we can no longer pray in our Schools, that we can no longer display God’s truth publicly, that millions of babies are being slaughtered yearly, that we are living in the greediest period of our countries history, that divorce is at its all time high, that injustice prevails everywhere.

2. Rom. 13:6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. 

Rulers are the servants of God. They may think they are their own man or woman. But they have no real choice but to serve their creator. When we vote…we get to participate in choosing God’s next servants. What a responsibility! few in the world ever actually get that privilege. It is a privilege that most of us take quite lightly.

3. Ezra 6:10 that they may offer acceptable sacrifices to the God of heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons.

Here we see a simple plea by Ezra. Pray for the King. As I close this note I ask you to do a simple thing. Pray for the President. Pray for the next President.

a. Pray that they will serve this nation with righteousness

b. Pray that they will restore justice to those who have been denied it.

c. Pray that they will uphold the Constitution on which this nation was built.

d. Pray that they will honor the right for all people to worship God without hindrance.

e. Pray that they will give the unborn a voice and let them live.

f. Pray that they will walk with wisdom and uprightness in the matters of economy, not giving preference to any particular industry, that they will help create an economy that will create jobs that all may work.

g. That they will be a man or woman who will listen to God’s voice concerning our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. That they will be a man or woman of Peace.

That is my hearts desire as I go to vote today. And by the way, if you are not planning on voting you are probably wrong already. It is a privilege we have as Americans….let’s use it.

And for heavens sake…..PRAY!

What stirs your affection for Christ?

The other day a mentor of mine sent me a short article online by a man named Matt Chandler. In this article Matt begins by saying that he has begun to ask himself a different question to gauge where his walk with Christ is rather than the old question. I too have an old question. I think for years I gauged my walk with Christ by how good my quiet time was, how I treated people, how my thought life was. Frankly, it was a very non-christian way of viewing my life. That is the world’s way of evaluating success. In a sense when we evaluate our lives by standards such as that we are being expressly non-christian. You see what differentiates us as followers of Christ from every other religion is that we do not achieve success as a child of God by what we do. We achieve success as a child of God by He has done and is doing. By the way, that is the heart of the Gospel message. God so loved…. that He gave. Yes, we must believe, but even that is given by him. The writer of Hebrews says that Jesus himself is the author of my faith.

Let me pose a thought to you. When you are tempted to evaluate your life by what you are doing, stop and ask yourself if you are being guilty of suspending your belief in the Gospel for that moment in order to believe that way. Others believe that they are good therefore God loves and accepts them. The Gospel tells us that God is good therefore He accepts us and then we follow Him.

That brings back to Matt’s article. Matt’s personal evaluation question is not how good he has been, but “What stirs my affection for Christ?” What when I am doing it. when I/m around it, or dwelling on it creates a greater hunger for, passion, for and worship of Christ and His mission?  I would propose to you that when you ask the wrong question you will always get the wrong answer. Matt is asking the right question. I confess that when I read that I had to stop and ask myself once again…..”what stirs my affection for Christ?”  My list was a little different from his but similar in ways. My list includes: talking with a few close friends about Jesus and God’s Word, newborn babys, long walks alone, seasons of silence, a well written book. Those are just a few things I can think of off the top of my head.

What stirs your affection for Christ? Can you list a few things?

Now he went on to ask the next logical question. It was logical to me anyway. “What robs me of my affection for Christ?” ie What when I am doing it, or spending time around it created in me an unhealthy love for the world? Wow! I must confess that when I started thinking about that list honestly I came to several uncomfortable conclusions. 1. Most of the things that robbed me of my affection for Christ were not  in and of themselves either morally or ethically wrong. They were pretty neutral. 2. They were things I have been doing for quite a long time and have been a part of my life forever. 3. I have become so used to doing them that their subtlety is deceptive.

These things are usually associated with excess in one form or another. Things that I listed as that which robs me of my affection for Christ. Things like: over-eating, watching mind-less movies, spending excessive time cruising the internet, sleeping in, laziness.

This is not rocket science is it? We do what we want to do and it can rob us of our intimacy with Christ, often without our even being aware that it is. I am sure that you, like me know when what you are doing is stealing our zeal for our Savior.

I am going to commit myself to concentrate on being engaged in the things that stir my affections for Christ and less on the things that rob me of that affection. How about you?

The Calm in the Storm

Does there seem to be some kind of doom looming on the horizon? The world’s financial markets are crumbling. The US politico machinery is once again going thru its quadrennial Election boogie woogie. Our culture is more socially and politically polarized than ever. The human crisis in Darfur continues to worsen. The Russians are flexing their muscles again. The Middle East is poised to erupt yet again into a new wave of sectarian violence. Pakistan is on the verge of exploding or should I say imploding. China is beginning to push its ideological agenda across Africa. Europe is in a deep identity crisis. India is in an internal crisis as well. The environment is rebelling against us. Energy prices are higher than ever. The housing market is screaming in the throes of strangulation.

The entire world seems to be standing at a precipice just waiting to either step off into oblivion or jump off into a mirey morass of chaos.  Ought we not be concerned? I am….. but maybe differently so than you might think.

You know what I am most concerned about. I am mostly concerned about the apathy I see in the Christian Church to all that looms ahead of us. I find it interesting that in the midst of all that is happening most Christians I know are not seeing beyond the boundries of the stresses and messes in their own lives.

Here are a few things  I am seeing (right or wrong)

1. We are in a war. That is right! Our nation is at war and most of the Christians I know are in agreement that our armed forces should fight terrorists abroad so that we do not have to fight them here. While steeped in admiration, there is little thought given to actually serving their country themselves because it simply does not fit their personal agenda for their lives. And we will justify ourselves by saying that “God is not calling me to do that.” I personally don’t understand that level of complacency. Did I mention that there is a war going on. It is a real war, a war being fought by real people. My question is where are the young Christian men and women who are prepared to lay down their lives for what they believe in?

2. We live in a tragicly suffering world. Everywhere I travel I see levels of poverty that only transcend the levels of poverty that I have previously seen. Why are we as Christians continuing to build our own little comfortable lifestyles and ignoring those who are in bondage to injustice, who suffer egregiously from disease after disease, who are hungry, who are homeless? How can we go on building our castles while there is a terribly hurting world around us? Read Isaiah 58 and 1 John. Is there really any possible justification for our ambivalence? Why are we not spending or live in behalf of the hurting in the world today? We wonder why the world is ambivalent towards the church today. It is because the world listens to the message that we preach and then looks at the lives that we live and concludes that there cannot possibly be any power in that message by the evidence of our lives.

3. We toy with sin as if it were some kind of hot potato game. We know we shouldn’t play with it but we do nonetheless because “it is fun,” “it feels good,” and that is my inalienable right as an American…. to feel good. Somewhere along the way we stopped seeing sin as an affront to a Holy Creator God and started seeing it as something to be avoided when it was not too difficult a thing. We toy with sin at our own peril. We simply must regain a biblical understanding of sin and its cancerous effects on our lives. Sin is killing us. It is not our friend. It is eroding the tissue of our lives slowly, but be for certain it is there doing its nefarious work on our lives.

Ok, there I said it. I got off my chest a few of the things that have really been heavy on my heart lately. There is more, but I don’t want to go on right now. Why? because hear me say this…. amidst all that is happening in the world today there is one thing I am certain of. “Jesus loves me…. this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” To a hardened world out there that will sound silly and trite. My dear brothers and sisters never, never, ever let that message become silly or trite. Our father loved us so much He sent his one and only son to die a horrible death on the cross for us…. that is you and me.

With all that is going on in the world we must never lose sight that we serve a sovereign King who is still on His throne and what separates us from everyone else is that He loves us first and because He loved first, we are freed to love Him and serve Him back.