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.
