From the Heart of the Pastor

Has a Nation Changed Gods? (Jeremiah 2)
“They exchanged the truth of God for the lie” (Romans 1:25)
Based upon the world’s standards (if there are any!), God was and is politically, socially and culturally incorrect. Nonetheless, is there any one out there soberly and intelligently challenging the world’s definition of the shape our culture should take? Since we are our brothers’ keepers, we certainly are responsible for weighing in on the issues affecting our children and our children’s children.
The Reformation was both a spiritual and cultural event. The culture was altered by Martin Luther’s ‘Here I stand.’ Perhaps the time has come for Reformation II. The Christian’s desire is not to wield power, but to influence lives. Christian influence introduces and produces moral character.
God allows you sufficient weaponry: His word, His Son, His character and prayer. Perhaps the problem is that those mounting pulpits and even Christians resting in pews are not willing to challenge their culture. Perhaps they are willing to shed tears of brine, but not tears of blood.
The churches of your land are filled with the almost-Christian who may be busy with the ceremony of religion. He practices a formal religion with a heart untuned to the gravity of his sin. God describes these men as those who are “holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power” (II Timothy 3:5). Many of these men exhibit ethical/moral behavior but they are merely unregenerate humanists. They want their churches to announce their births, perform their marriages and honor their deaths, but they are disinterested in their church life affecting their economics.
Others in your churches are Christians but they possess a shallow spirituality, and they are apathetic concerning their minds and lives being engaged in the things of God. These single-celled Christians are biblical adolescents and juvenile in their walk with the Lord Jesus Christ. They continue to retreat from the means to grow in the Lord so their spiritual barrenness increases proportionately.
In the 1830’s Alexis de Toqueville, a noted Frenchman, said, “There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” Would de Toqueville’s statement be true today?
Everyone needs exposure to other Christians who are enthusiastic about their relationship with the Lord. When you companion with others in your marketplaces who are bold in their witness for Jesus, you become bolder. The lifestyles and practices of fervent Christians are the scalpels God provides in order that your society may be sculpted more completely into the image of His Son. Edmund Calamy said, “The nature of man is more apt to be guided by example than by precept.”
God calls each Christian to be an engine for the transformation of his sphere of influence. You are to serve as tutoring members of the commonwealth where you live (Matthew 28:18-20).
You know that a person’s walk with the Lord Jesus is dependent on growing in faith (II Peter 1:5ff.). In order for anyone to advance in his walk he must begin to think and act biblically. His life must become more ‘theocentric’ (God-centered) at the expense of divorcing himself from a life that is so completely ‘anthropocentric’ (man-centered). He must become disenculturated from his American Babylon.
This will only begin to occur when Christians refuse to be passive in the shaping of their marketplaces by making their values known in their marketplaces (Nahum 1:15). Everywhere you go you see carnal men who are secure in their sinful sleep. The noisiness of their damned souls is so loud they never experience the cadence of your Christ. Perhaps you are being called upon by the Holy Spirit to create in His power a national conscience on the things of the Lord. Perhaps today is being shaped by God to become a market-day for the souls of men.
Although the ages come and go, human nature is the same in every age. Man is born spiritually lifeless and remains in that state until awakened by God’s Spirit. Nonetheless, God has chosen to deploy Christians in the business of bringing and living His gospel.
Numerous denominations and churches are in a spiritual wilderness. The people God has placed in their charges are not being fed or at least are malnourished in the feeding. The preachers and teachers are answering questions their hearers either are not asking or previously have answered and now want to grow deeper in their relationship with their Father. Legions of saints are coming to churches asking for bread but they are being given a stone (Matthew 7:9). Countless church attendees are fatigued by the church and now attend only out of duty and tradition rather than a love for the Lord.
Effective Christians feast on the diet of Christ. They need encouragement. Political correctness has become the cultural master of America spying and reporting on those spiritually correct, yet culturally incorrect, Christians. The media and a minority of the populace has said that Christians cannot speak the name Jesus, so now Christians must be reminded that God Himself has given them permission to share their faith wherever He places them (Esther 4:14).
When Christians lose their enthusiasm to declare their allegiance to the God who has saved them, the world squanders its interest in the true living God. God says, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24).
As is true in any civilization, when issues continue to remain unaddressed by those with responsibility for the nurture of the people, the degeneration excels as the implosion bleeds over into other arenas of human involvement. Societal boundaries have become blurred, and when boundaries become blurred your senses lose their defenses. You cease being able to distinguish between vice and virtue, right and wrong. Abraham Kuyper, the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, said:
“If your boundary has become uncertain, vague, even invisible, the fear of drawing your sword soon keeps your hand from the hilt and no one fears any blame for taking one step backward after another. This process continues until finally the sacred domain is totally lost and no courage remains for a struggle that is now useless. It is precisely that uncertainty which cuts the lines of our power, that lack of firmness which makes us hesitant, that hesitancy which causes us to hang back and procrastinate, and with that procrastination the fire of our enthusiasm dies out before we realize it… the line of defense was shrunk again and again. As soon as principles gain ground that are contrary to your deepest
convictions, then resistance is your duty and acquiescence a sin. Then, at the price of the finest peace, you must attack those principles, stigmatizing them before the eyes of friend and foe alike with all the ardor of your faith.”
The city fathers are prone to address symptoms rather than the heart of the matter because symptoms are more visible. Symptoms are also easier to battle than root causes because attending to root causes results in the expenditure of increased resources and assures intensive opposition.
The first century A.D. was a moral sewer. God Almighty drove a stake into the heart of that era by powering His cross into the earth of that amoral society. He sent His only Son to anoint His cross of separation “with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless” (I Peter 1:19). The cross He drove into Palestinian soil continues eternally and is non-negotiable.
No society wants awakening from its death-assuring sleep. Those attempting to reestablish moral boundaries should expect opposition. They must be willing to go into harm’s way by weighing anchor and refusing to pursue diversions. God says, “They hate him who reproves in the gate, and they abhor him who speaks with integrity. Hate evil, love good, and establish justice in the gate!” (Amos 5:10, 15).
An uncivil war is being waged for the heart of your American commonwealth. Tragically, this moral Armageddon is occurring largely unnoticed by churchmen professing Christianity though who are, for the most part, disengaged. Perhaps their lives are becoming so handcuffed by their confederacy with the world that their public virtue has become private. Perhaps they are warehousing their Christ rather than proclaiming Him (I Peter 2:9). Perhaps they are content with an ever-diminishing influence in their world, but God is not.
Christians are becoming increasingly silent on public policy issues thereby forfeiting their defense of the borders of common decency. The destructive savages of self-centered humanism are ravaging your culture. Christians seem to forget that Christianity was birthed in conflict. The blood of the Nazarene was necessary to erect the scaffolding of the culture of grace. Christianity grows in the midst of cultural conflict because its true adherents are identified and caused to grow deeper roots (Matthew 13:21).
The axe is already laid at the root of your societal tree. The fabric of your society is coming unraveled due to the aggressiveness of those without eternal virtue and the Christian’s lack of concern for what does not immediately and directly affect him (Amos 6:1). Your nation is dying due to the silence of the lambs – that is what occurs when Christians become indulgers rather than engagers (Mark 8:38). Epidemic lukewarmness has licensed Christendom’s slumber along with its accompanying spiritual barrenness (Revelation 3:15-17).
What would it be like to live in a world wherein the world determines the appropriate boundaries rather than God? What would it be like to live in a world that dismantles its virtuous cornerstones one at a time so that the dismantling is less noticeable (though no less destructive)? What would it be like to live in a world wherein the worship of man has supplanted the worship of God, the focus of man has shifted from heaven to earth and human opinion has usurped divine revelation (Jeremiah 2:11)? What would it be like to live in a world where the moral man seeks quiet retreats rather than the endeavor of the public domain?
Faith only matters when it affects one’s choices (Joshua 24:15). God says, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom He has chosen for His own inheritance” (Psalm 33:12). The one and only God says, “Righteousness exalts a nation” (Proverbs 14:34).
Biblical morality has become cultural immorality. Biblical correctness has become political incorrectness (Matthew 15:19). Nonetheless, God commands those respecting and honoring Him to stand unashamedly in the cultural gap for biblical morality and holiness (Ezekiel 22:30). When Christians become worshipers of public opinion and social acceptability rather than worshipers of the God of Scripture they refuse to stand in the gap (Jeremiah 2:6; Romans 1:21-25).
In the cultures of the western world, the less faith one professes, the more sensible and well bred he is considered. The verbal expression of Christianity has become the dividing line between the intellectual and the not so bright. Your nation has entered a spiritual “Dark Ages” where everyone does what is right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25).
Unless Christians recapture the voice they once exercised, both Christian and non-Christian will become oppressed by unrighteousness, erotically controlled, state monitored and enslaved to an existence that your forefathers not only would have never conceived, but they paid with their own blood to prevent. The children of your loins will become increasingly the property of the state rather than the parents; educating the public on such unpopular topics as homosexuality, adultery, pedophilia and euthanasia will become hate crimes; and the pagan altar of Satanism will be covered in the blood of silent parents and grandparents who were more fearful of men, of economic reprisals, and of social ostracism than they were of the living God (Romans 3:18).
Jesus was not afraid to address unrighteousness and the unrighteous by name! Jesus calls the unrighteous culturalists what they really are: “blind guides,” “fools and blind men,” “full of lawlessness,” “serpents,” and a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 23:16, 17, 28, 33). He never practiced the sin of silence.
In A.D. 98, Ignatius’ expressed faith resulted in him being thrown to the lions of the empire. If you take culturally unpopular positions, you too shall be scorned and labeled a narrow-minded intolerant prejudiced bigot. But then, should not every God-fearer always be intolerant of and prejudiced against what has been wrong in every culture since the foundation of the world?
You must not quail; you must not blink; you must remain unflinchingly biblical. Every Christian is a God-appointed cultural watchman. Upon whose hands will the blood of your culture be (Ezekiel 3:18)? Is now not the season to do right just because it is right (Acts 5:29; II Timothy 4:6-8)?
“A lion has roared! Who will not fear?
The Lord God has spoken! Who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8)
SOLI DEO GLORIA!