We are not called to be John McClane

 

There is a dialogue taking place in churches after the shooting in Sutherland Springs.  This conversation is focused on church security and protecting members of the congregation.  Many in church leadership are calling for a review of how churches can provide a more secure environment.  The topic of security is not new and has continued to gain momentum since the Charleston shooting in 2016.

That emotion is easy to understand.  We are seeing a trend of churches being attacked, and with the last one in Sutherland Springs, they are becoming more deadly.  So much so, that there are now calls for armed security at churches.  Is this how we are supposed to respond to persecution, or attacks?  Are we called to beef up security, train ourselves for a violent response, or to be armed while we are at church?

The reality of Charleston and Sutherland Springs is that there is no way the shooter could have been stopped unless there was someone armed and on the premises when the firing began to happen.  As churches continue to discuss security, this will become plain to all and should leave any rational or logical evaluation with this conclusion.  But is that what we should do as Christians?  Are we responding to these shootings in the way the world would react or the way that Christ would respond?  Fortunately for us, the New Testament offers significant testimony to followers during times of persecution.

I know that this will more than likely not be popular in an America that is pro second amendment.  I know this will not be popular in a culture that has been taught that we have every right to defend ourselves, and our families.  I know that this will not be popular in a western Christian culture which doesn’t know how to respond to this type of murderous persecution biblically.  But I also know that the Bible does not call for an armed response to threats to our or our family’s persons.  In fact, it calls for just the opposite.  In fact, there are over 70 different verses in the New Testament describing our response to OR THE BENEFIT OF persecution.  There is not one instance, IN ALL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, that calls for better security or armed protection of believers.  Here are a few examples.

Romans 8:35-37 – Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

1 Peter 4:19 – Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.

Romans 12:17-21 –  Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. 18 If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it[i] to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 20 To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

1 Peter 4:12-19 – Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.  But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.  If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.  But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler.  Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.  For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?   And “If the righteous is scarcely saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?”  Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.

So what do we take from this?  Reading this, and the many other scriptures it would appear that we are called to just…suffer.  This is so contrary to everything in our culture which would have us crawling through air vents to take out would be shooters.  Does that mean that we are just to stand there and take it?  There is no instance in the New Testament where believers took up arms to stop persecution.  In fact, the one documented incident of a Christian fighting back resulted in his actions being rebuked by Christ himself.  Of course, I am referring to Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane.

In all of the documented instances of Paul, Stephen, or other nameless Christians being persecuted, there is no instance where Paul says to take up arms to protect yourself in church.

As the dialogue continues into church security, I hope that church leadership takes into consideration those who were persecuted in the New Testament.  I hope that the church does not cave to the trappings of the American culture, but instead caves to the rewards of a kingdom mentality.  We are citizens of the kingdom first and must act according to those ethics, rather than American ethics.

So the conversation shouldn’t be about added layers of security.  Instead, the discussion should be whether we dare to remain biblical in the face of persecution.

US Government Persecution of Christians continues

Not that I am a doom or gloom type of a guy but I feel like we have reached that line in the sand as a culture.  Rather than looking down at the line and pausing for a moment to contemplate what the next step should be, our culture has now jumped over the line and took off sprinting.  Last month I posted a link to an article from Breibart talking about the persecution of our brothers and sisters in the military.  Some of the verbiage used by the fellow who crafted the Department of Defense position was harsh.  Now I stumble across an article which brings the President into play in the ongoing persecution of Christians in the Military.

According to this article (READ HERE), Congressman John Fleming offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would protect the religious rights of soldiers.  To quote Fleming It would have “required the Armed Forces to accommodate ‘actions and speech’ reflecting the conscience, moral, principles or religious beliefs of the member.”  The Presidents response was that it would have a “significant adverse effect on good order, discipline, morale, and mission accomplishment.”

Weird how Christianity and the expression of Christianity would have a negative impact on morale, good order and discipline.

All I can do is sit and shake my head.  How does it come to this?

Fleming offered several examples of persecution within the amendment.  So check this out…

Fleming introduced the amendment after a series of high-profile incidents involving attacks on religious liberty within the military- including an Air Force officer who was told to remove a Bible from his desk because it might give the impression he was endorsing a religion.

He said there are other reports of Christian service members and chaplains being punished for their faith.

• The Air Force censored a video created      by a chaplain because it include the word “God.” The Air Force feared the      word might offend Muslims and atheists.
• A service member received a “severe and      possibly career-ending reprimand” for expressing his faith’s religious      position about homosexuality in a personal religious blog.
• A senior military official at Fort      Campbell sent out a lengthy email officially instructing officers to      recognize “the religious right in America” as a “domestic hate group” akin      to the KKK and Neo-Nazis because of its opposition to homosexual behavior.
• A chaplain was relieved of his command      over a military chapel because, consistent with DOMA’s definition of      marriage, he could not allow same-sex weddings to take place in the      chapel.

Folks, I have said it before and I will say it again.  We are on the downward slope here.  The persecution cat is now out of the bag.  Right now the trend is persecution because it will be offensive (political correctness).  At some point it will turn into a crime where we will be literally punished for our beliefs, when they (the world) see that we are more concerned about eternal life rather than the immediacy of this life and continue to evangelize.

We may not be very far from that based on the Breibart article .  It is beginning to get real now.  We have to be preparing ourselves mentally for the sacrifice that we will have to make in order to honor God and follow through on the Great Commission.

Persecution has begun here in America…And it starts with our Armed Forces!

Good efternoon everyone.  It is with a heavy heart that I write this post.

Persecution of Christianity has officially begun here in the Unitied States and it begins in the Department of Defense.  This would include ALL armed forces that report up through the DOD.   See the article… So here is the deal… According to the report the gentleman who is responsible for drafting the verbiage that would actually imprison a service member for sharing his faith has stated this “Christians–including chaplains–sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the military are guilty of “treason,” and of committing an act of “spiritual rape” as serious a crime as “sexual assault.” He also asserted that Christians sharing their faith in the military are “enemies of the Constitution.”

To see what he really thinks of Christians CLICK HERE

It appears that the official verbiage, as confirmed by the Pentagon states the following:  “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense…Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis”

And so it goes.  The government has now made it illegal to evangelize in the Armed Services.  This puts our Christian brothers and sisters in the armed services on another front line for Christ, as they risk imprisonment and dishonarable discharge for simply caring enough about their fellow soldiers to offer Christ to them.

The Great Commission is our single charge directly from Jesus.  Because we love Jesus we obey His command, which is to go forth and to make disciples.  We cannot go forth and make disciples without proselytization.  Because we love our brothers and sisters we tell them about the salvation that awaits them.  To ask a Christian to not evanglize is to simply ask them to not be a Christian, and to disobey an order from God Himself.

We are no longer protected, and are now officially a persecuted group from our US Government.  It is time to be prepared mentally for the sacrifice that we are going to be asked to make here in the very near future.

Would you die for a lie?

So….I have been out exploring on Google, and decided to Google “die for a lie”.  Of course the first two posts are negative responses to the disciples.  So I decided to peruse the blog posts, and came to the conclusion that they missed the mark on their analysis.  The same analysis is basically being used by any number of atheists and includes the following arguments:

1.      That there is no historical evidence that those listed in The Gospels as having seen the resurrected Christ even saw the resurrected Christ.

2.     If they were not given the option to recant, then they did not die for a lie.

These two points are what a number of Atheists will use to try to define the argument in a way that is not based in truth.

That there is no historical evidence that those listed in Acts as having seen the resurrected Christ even saw the resurrected Christ.

As always, I will be operating under the fact that every word in the Gospel’s and Acts is 100% reliable, historical, fact (because it is).

I have always looked at Acts as the sequel to the Gospels (metaphorically speaking, not the literal sequal).  The Empire Strikes Back to the Star Wars.  The Spiderman 2 to Spiderman 1. The….well you get the idea.

Towards the end of the Gospels, Christ has been crucified.  The Disciples have fled.  Peter has denied Jesus three times and fled.  The disciples were on the verge of giving up, they were hopeless.  Any number of descriptions can be used here.  The key is that the disciples thought that Christ was a King.  No matter how Jesus tried to emphasize it wasn’t what they thought, they believed him to be an earthly King.  When he died… they did in fact wonder… So what happened?  Basically this same group who were despondent upon the death of Christ turn around and begin preaching that he was in fact God and had been resurrected as the book of Acts gets going.

So let’s put this into context.  These men had witnessed His arrest.  Some of them scattered after that.  At least one of them witnessed his actual crucifixion.  All of them knew about his death.  So what would convince these men to go preach the deity and resurrection of Jesus?  Not only that, but what would convince them that they needed to preach this in the face of beating’s, flogging’s, imprisonment, and ultimately… death?

The actions of individuals are always motivated by events.  That is human nature.  So the more appropriate question… what event took place that caused these men to go and spread the word?  Acts says it is one event.  Not just the resurrection of Jesus, not the empty tomb, but Jesus appearing before them in the flesh.

Now, in some of these posts I saw online there were comparisons to the people who died for Heaven’s Gate.  You remember… the cult that committed mass suicide?!  David Koresh is another popular tie-in here for Atheists.  The Atheist wants you to believe that these people died for a lie.  They would be correct in their observation.  But their observation is under the auspice that the Gospel accounts and Acts are not 100% truth.

Here is the primary difference between the disciples and Heaven’s Gate.  The disciples would have known that the whole thing was a lie.  Think about this for just a second.  Jesus had said that he would die and be resurrected three days later… If Jesus had NOT revealed himself to them… would they have gone and preached the resurrection?  NO! They would have known that the whole thing was a hoax.  Would they have perpetuated this hoax to become famous or rich?  History (Acts specifically) shows that this most certainly was not the case.  As a matter of fact only death, beatings, and imprisonment awaited these men. For the atheists’ analogy to hold true either the cult members would have had to have foreknowledge that allowed them to know definitively whether or not their leaders were who and what they claimed. The facts are that these unfortunate souls were not afforded the opportunity to see the claims of their belief system crumble.

On the other hand, the Disciples’ actions are the definitive proof that something happened to turn them from cowards to the very definition of courage.  That event was documented in the Gospels, and in Acts.  It could only be one thing, Christ himself in the flesh.

If they were not given the option to recant, then they did not die for a lie.

An Atheist will use this as the foundation to say that the Disciples did not die for a lie.  Instead they say that there is no historical proof that ANY of the martyrs were given the opportunity to recant prior to being martyred.  I say, that they absolutely were.

The presumption of the Atheist is that a Christian must be brought in, questioned and THEN be afforded an opportunity to back out on their previous claims – recant the story of Christ.  I would ask… why were they arrested in the first place?

To illustrate look at the persecution of Christians by Saul.

That persecution was more like a man hunt.  How do they avoid the man hunt… simply stop preaching the word!  Think about it.  These people were dying horrible deaths for being associated and accepting the label of Christ.  If it was a lie all they would have had to do would be to stop preaching, stop associating with other Christians, etc… THAT ALONE is an outright recant of Jesus and His resurrection.  But that did not happen- Which makes this all the more incredible!!!  At any given time these people could have said… I am tired of ALL of this, I don’t want to die… and simply walked away.

So what can we take from this… A very real event occurred that spurred these men into action.  That took them from despair to screaming about Jesus in the streets of Jerusalem.  That event had to have been real, and not some conjured up story that a group of men made up.  Remember most of the original disciples died a horrible death because of this event.  In addition… at any time they could have simply avoided it by denying they were Christians.  These men did not die for a lie.  They were perhaps some of the most courageous men in the history of the world.

Here’s what one of those very men wrote just before he died for his faith: “I know that I will soon put it aside, as our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. And I will make every effort to see that after my departure you will always be able to remember these things.  We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

I can’t believe this! How can this happen?!

I ran into this story (Supreme Court Case) while piddling around on Google.  If you remember a few weeks ago I wrote a piece on the omnipresence of God.  Basically the argument was that the world is trying to convince you that God does not belong in certain aspects of our lives.  Among those places was school.  According to the article a small college in San Francisco withdrew a clubs right to be recognized as an official club on their campus.  The club had asked members to sign a statement of faith consistent with a biblical standard of sexual morality.  If you are wondering what type of club it was… you guessed it.  It is a Christian club.  The college revoked the club status under the guise that it would discriminate against homosexuals.  To sum up… the college wanted this club to remove God from their club or to worship a God that did not exist.

Now this is probably appalling to a number of you reading this.  How can this happen?  Especially here in America where we have been given the right to free speech!  Simply put…this is happening because the Bible said that it would.  Look at 2 Timothy 3.  There are a number of verses that are applicable to this situation.  The one I want to focus on here is 2 Timothy 3:12.  “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted”.  As is the case with so many other things in the Bible…there is no qualification, no gray area, just a simple statement.  If you WANT to live a godly life…you will be persecuted. 

Another interesting verse to consider is John 15:18-21.

18″If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 19If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. 20Remember the words I spoke to you: ‘No servant is greater than his master.'[a] If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. 21They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the One who sent me.”

What is this verse telling us?  Simply put…you will be persecuted for your faith.  No if’s, and’s or but’s about it.  In this case, the club had the opportunity to gain favor by denying biblical truth.  Rather, they have turned their back on the world, and now the world hates them for it.  They are doing it right.  Another interesting aspect here is the use of the word “will” in verse 21.  Again, no gray area.  Christ leaves little doubt as to the results of your faith when it comes to dealing with the world.  You WILL be persecuted because you KNOW God, and the world does not.

We can be certain that this type of persecution for our faith is going to happen – there is no need to be appalled.  At a certain point this club had the opportunity to turn their back on God and his word.  Rather than cowering to man, they stood up for God.   

I know it is a natural, instinctive emotional response to get angry.  Why get angry?  Know the truth and be comfortable in it.  This will happen because God said it would.  This cannot be emphasized enough.  Rejoice with this club for taking a stand for God, and not caving to the world (cf. James 1:2).  Rejoice with anyone who defies the world and does not forsake their faith so that the world will love them.