My Dear Brothers and Sisters, I greet you today in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I know that many of you are very troubled by yesterday’s election outcome and even more by the overall direction our country appears to be taking. You, like I, care deeply for this country and know that its ultimate hope lies in a set of values and beliefs that we appear to be rejecting as a nation. You view President Obama’s reelection as even further indication that the country we love is becoming something other, something different, something, quite frankly, you don’t respect as much. I understand that.
But I feel compelled to remind you today that what you and I do right now is very important. I feel this compulsion, in part, because I share some of your frustrations, but also because I have been quite frankly shocked at some things openly confessing Christians have said and/or written about our President over the last few days. It has not been a good reflection of the Christ we serve.
Our Lord described us as salt and light. He said that we are to be the preserving and directing forces in our culture. He said that it would be our love–not our theology, our religious performances, and certainly not our political persuasions–that would be our greatest gift to our society. But he also warned that if we ceased to be salt, if we ceased to be light, and if we ceased to love, then we would become ineffective and lose our right to serve in his name.
I am afraid that we are getting dangerously close to becoming like the gripy Israelites who God left to die in the desert, or worse, the churches in Revelation who were dangerously close to losing their holy lampstands.
Perhaps we need to be reminded that God never promised us a certain way of life, or that the pursuit of happiness is an American, not a biblical virtue.
Perhaps we need to be reminded that for two thousand years Christians have lived under oppressive, repressive and even hostile governments and yet were still commanded to pray for their leaders.
Perhaps we need to be reminded that the vast majority of believers around the world live hand-to-mouth, sleep on the ground or in extremely rough, impoverished and unsafe settings, will never own a Bible, will never go to college, don’t have retirement accounts, don’t own or drive cars, don’t play golf on weekends or go on spontaneous shopping sprees, don’t have air-conditioned and heated church buildings, and never have to decide what they are going to wear out the next day. Americans, even in the economic challenges of the last several years, still have far more wealth and enjoy far more freedom than any nation in history.
And to all of that Jesus would say, to whom much is given much is required.
Christian brothers and sisters, we have work to do. It is the Church (believers in Jesus), that are the thermostat of a nation. Whatever we are set on is what our nation will become. If we are troubled by the direction our nation is going, then perhaps we need to compare our American Christianity to biblical Christianity, and adjust our thinking so that we are more of the latter than the former.
The future of our nation depends on it.
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