Many Americans asked for God’s grace and guidance for the United States during the 65th annual National Day of Prayer. During an observance in Naperville faith leaders called on God’s people to choose leaders who will protect the institutions that He created families, church, and government.
“The Gospel of Christ doesn’t care about ‘tolerance.’ It cares about truth.”
These words caused me to look up from my Bible Gateway app where I was reading along with selected scriptures. Matt Short, missions pastor at One Community Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, had just uttered from the pulpit a profound reality that, regrettably, we hear far too infrequently from this millennial generation (or any generation for that matter).
After several weeks of having worshiped with this young church body, I’ve been repeatedly shocked, and pleasantly so, that, under the headship of lead pastor Paul Dudley and, clearly, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, this group of faithful 20 and 30-somethings does not sidestep truth, in love, as concerns transcendent issues that in today’s politically correct and postmodern culture (to include much of Christianity) are considered highly controversial.
Pastor Short judiciously stacked his words – words that blossomed from the very Vine of Truth Himself – upon that elusive sweet spot in the tense continuum between truth and grace: two central features of Christ’s nature that are neither mutually exclusive nor at odds with one another.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” we are reminded in Ecclesiastes 1:9.
Indeed, by today’s secular-progressive standards – and, more vexing yet, by the standards of lukewarm Christians and ministries that, under the intense thaw of postmodern paganism, fall away from the berg like vast chunks of ice – Christ Jesus Himself would, like so many of his followers today, be slandered as an “intolerant bigot” and crucified all over again.
To be sure, under the contemporary misconception of “tolerance,” which supposes that one must not only tolerate sin of every stripe, but refuse to call it even that, Christ was (and is) intolerant indeed. Rather than admonishing the adulterous woman to, “Go now and leave your life of sin” (see John 8:11), postmodernism, to include the moral relativist yeast that leavens the body of Christ, demands, at once, that our never-changing Lord change the unchangeable: “Go now and continue your life of sin.”
This is not true grace.
It is cheap grace.
And it is apostasy.
While it is true that none of us is without sin (I’m the first to drop my stone in the sand for this reason), we are nonetheless commanded to repent of our sins: “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will likewise perish (Luke 13:3).”
The first step to repentance is recognizing sin for what it is and rejecting deceptive attempts to sanitize it by calling it something else (i.e., “choice,” “sexual orientation,” “she’s not my wife, but we’re soul mates” and the like). Alas, ’tis true: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20).
Indeed, far too many “seeker friendly” and mainline Christian denominations do just that. They call evil good. They intentionally omit the central “repent and go and sin no more” elements of the good news (or otherwise affirm sin altogether) for fear of driving away would-be fish in the net – those slippery little buggers (aren’t we all?) who prefer whirling about in a toxic sea of temptation, rather than surrendering to the ultimate Fisher of Men.
Pastor Short, to his credit, did no such thing. In fact, he went on to address Paul’s rebuke of the church in Galatia. Much like today’s “nicer than Jesus” set, they, too, for different reasons perhaps, adopted a false gospel that, in their eyes, made them more “relevant” and palatable to the world around them.
Sound familiar?
Wrote Paul: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you,let them be under God’s curse!” (Galatians 1:6-8)
Not very tolerant.
But grace, tempered with truth, nonetheless.
“As we have already said,” Paul continued, “so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse! Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:9-10).
And so, according to Paul, those who shrink from the “full counsel of God,” are not only out of line, they are under “God’s curse.” The fall he took on the road to Damascus clearly knocked free his ability to skate the thin ice of political correctness.
Still, like the Galatians, far too many in today’s church are more concerned with not offending others, most especially those who are without Christ, and, rather than being fearless “servants of Christ,” instead have busied themselves with “trying to please people.”
And, like the Galatians, they have created a false gospel to that end.
Pleasing the world is not taking up your cross and suffering for Christ. Pleasing the world is a cakewalk. “If 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” (John 15:19).
Does the world hate you?
It should.
We can’t belong to the world and to Christ.
We must choose.
(Note: Let’s help our young brothers and sisters continue speaking Christ’s truth, in love. I urge you to give to the powerful ministry of One Community Church.)
I love America, and I expect you do as well. We love it for the liberties it embraced, for the goodness it sought, for its generosity to a world of sufferers everywhere, for its founding upon biblical principles. We love it in spite of its failures, just as we love our family and friends in spite of their failures, because Americans have labored so relentlessly and invested so much to correct its flaws.
But, those who know history see the path our beloved nation is on and note that we’ve seen this before. Every nation has a life-cycle, and eventually reaches its end. But, must it end this way for America, too? Are we on an unalterable slide into the “dustbin” of history? Has God turned His face from us forever? The question for those of us who love and honor the God of history is to ask what He seeks from us? Is He finished with America or not?
As dark as things appear to be it is still too early to know the answer. For those who trust God, this is no time for pessimism or despair. Neither should we try to decipher biblical prophecy in order to apply it to our case.
So, how should we pray? Some demand that Christians call on God to judge America for its sins of abortion and immorality. But, are we more just than God? Are we wiser than He? Is mercy unavailable for America?
It is God’s great grace and infinite mercy that compels me to answer with a resounding “NO!”
I do not know what God has in store for America, but this I do know. He is THE GOD OF MERCY, and He delights in turning away His wrath! The general disposition of His heart will be to show mercy, and to temper His judgment with grace. It is for us to bring our own hearts to the place where God would be pleased to show mercy, and to encourage others to do the same. If God is to withhold judgment on America, it is most likely to occur when and if the nation bends its knees in humility and repentance. For this we can pray. For this we must pray.
II Chronicles 7:14 lays out God’s allotted steps for revival. Yes, He was speaking to the theocracy of Israel, so there is no promise that should America follow this prescription God will relent of the judgment due us. However, should those who are “His people” transparently repent and seek His face, it may bring the nation closer to the condition where God would be willing to shower His grace.
While Sodom and Gomorrah were “exceedingly” wicked cities, God, in His mercy, agreed to spare them if only 10 righteous were found in them. Has His mercy changed? Does He regard Americans less? Consider King David’s assessment of God’s heart in Psalm 51 after being confronted for his immorality and murder in the affair of Bathsheba. Of God he said, “A broken and a contrite heart. . . You will not despise.” It may be that the ingredients in saints’ prayers across America which are necessary for deliverance are brokenness and heartfelt contrition.
For those who see the nation’s trend toward godlessness as a sign of the End Times and thus irreversible, let us not forget that God is sovereign over all. “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as rivers of water: He turns it wherever He will,” Proverbs 21:1. God’s judgment, while being justified, is not necessarily imminent!
As Christians we must be active in speaking against the wicked course upon which America has embarked. We must call for the election of good, moral and even godly leaders. We ought to form a bulwark against the onslaught of evil promoted by the cultural elites of Hollywood, government and the media. But, our first priority in seeking a different future for America is to seek the tender mercies of our Gracious Father in Heaven. Without His favor, other actions will utterly fail, and are, in fact, acts of idolatry and folly.
It may be that the question is not so much how to pray for America, but with what attitude we pray. A good place to begin would be that of a “broken and a contrite heart,” as well as an honest assessment of the desperateness of our plight!
If God does not preserve America from its deserved end, it is certain it will not be preserved. Let us bend the knee before our Holy God and seek His mercy for He alone can save.
They say there are no atheists in the foxhole.
Even fewer when death is certain.
None once the final curtain falls.
God’s Word declares, “The fool hath said in his heart ‘there is no God’” (Psalm 14).
For three decades, until his death in 1953, Josef Stalin was the mass-murdering atheist dictator of Soviet Russia.
He was also a fool.
In his 1994 book, “Can Man Live Without God,” famed Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias recounts a story he heard firsthand from British Journalist Malcomb Muggeridge “that stirred [him] then and still does even yet.”
Muggeridge had collaborated with Svetlana Stalin, Josef Stalin’s daughter, on a BBC documentary about her God-hating father. She recounted his last act of defiant rebellion against the Creator: “[A]s Stalin lay dying, plagued with terrifying hallucinations, he suddenly sat halfway up in bed, clenched his fist toward the heavens once more, fell back upon his pillow, and was dead.”
“[H]is one last gesture,” observed Zacharias, “was a clenched fist toward God, his heart as cold and hard as steel.”
In my experience it is something common among atheists: an inexplicable, incongruent and visceral hatred for the very God they imagine does not exist.
Indeed, Romans 1:20 notes, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
Yet excuses they make.
Psalm 19:1 likewise observes: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
The manifest intentionality and fine-tuning of all creation reveals design of breathtaking complexity. The Creator is of incalculable intelligence and infinite splendor. As I see it, atheism provides a case study in willful suspension of disbelief – all to escape, as the God-denier imagines it, accountability for massaging the libertine impulse.
Wouldn’t the atheist “suspend belief”? you might ask.
No, the phrase is properly “suspension of disbelief.” It is defined as “a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.”
In the case of the atheist, or the “freethinker,” as they paradoxically prefer, that which is unbelievable is that somehow everything came from nothing – that there is no uncaused first cause; that God does not exist, even as knowledge of His being is indelibly written on every human heart and proved by all He has made.
Be they theist, atheist or anti-theist, on this nearly all scientists agree: In the beginning there was nothing. There was no time, space or matter. There wasn’t even emptiness, only nothingness. Well, nothing natural anyway.
Then: bang! Everything. Nonexistence became existence. Nothing became, in less than an instant, our inconceivably vast and finely tuned universe governed by what mankind would later call – after we, too, popped into existence from nowhere, fully armed with conscious awareness and the ability to think, communicate and observe – “natural law” or “physics.”
Time, space, earth, life and, finally, human life were not.
And then they were.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Christian author Eric Metaxas notes:
“The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces – gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ nuclear forces – were determined less than one-millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction – by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 – then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp. … It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?”
Secular materialists claim it can’t be – that such explanation is a “God of the gaps” explanation and, therefore, must be banished from the realm of scientific inquiry. They demand that anything beyond the known natural is off-limits. Atheists attribute all of existence to, well, nothing. It just kind of happened. Genesis 1:1 of the materialist bible might read: “In the beginning nothing created the heavens and the earth.” Even in the material world that’s just plain silly. Nothing plus nothing equals something? Zero times zero equals everything?
And so, they have “reasoned” themselves into a corner. These same materialists acknowledge that, prior to the moment of singularity – the Big Bang – there was no “natural.” They admit that there was an unnatural time and place before natural time and space – that something, sometime, somewhere preceded the material universe. That which preceded the natural was, necessarily, “beyond the natural” and, therefore, was, is and forever shall be “supernatural.”
Reader, meet God.
In short: the Big Bang blows atheism sky high.
Fred Hoyle is the atheist astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang.” He once confessed that his disbelief was “greatly shaken” by the undisputed science, writing that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.”
Albert Einstein, who is often dishonestly characterized as having been an atheist, agreed that God-denial is foolishness. He once said of non-believers: “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.”
“I’m not an atheist,” added Einstein. “The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”
Illustrious NASA scientist (and agnostic) Dr. Robert Jastrow (1925-2008) put it this way:
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Yes, with time and chance, even science may eventually catch up to God’s Word.
Written by David Limbaugh
Can you believe anyone even organizes a “white privilege” conference these days — seven years into Barack Obama’s presidency? Well, you’d better believe it, and you should also know that at least one of the speakers at this conference is militantly Christophobic.
The 17th annual White Privilege Conference was held in Philadelphia from April 15 to 17. Blake Neff of The Daily Caller attended the conference and reported that “activist and author actually claimed that “almost every dysfunction in society, from racism and sexism to global warming and a weak economy, is united by the ideology of ‘Christian hegemony.’”
What’s the problem, you ask? Well, in the United States, according to Kivel, between 7,000 and 10,000 predominantly white Christian men run the major institutions and “colonize our mind” with Christianity’s core ideas, which leads to most of the world’s problems.
Kivel identified three particularly severe problems in the modern world that are caused or worsened by Christianity. First are wars in the Middle East, which he says are a result of Christianity’s effort to spread Western ideas and influence.
The Bible does direct Christians to spread the “good news” to the ends of the earth (Matthew 28:18-20). But Christianity started in the Middle East and spread outward from there. By A.D. 100, the Christian church had been established in regions throughout the Mediterranean, largely because of the Apostle Paul’s missionary journeys (Acts 16-20) and the evangelism of Peter, John and others.
The Middle East has switched hands countless times throughout history — Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Ottomans, British, French, Italians and others.
Perhaps Kivel had in mind America’s wars with Iraq in the past quarter-century and our effort to plant self-rule in the region. Though the wisdom of our nation-building effort can certainly be debated, our involvement is hardly the reason for the age-old conflicts in the Middle East, which, in all likelihood, will continue as long as the world does.
The second problem Kivel attributed to Christianity is the economic destruction it has caused because, wrote Neff, “it provides that God-like ‘invisible hand’ that supposedly drives market forces within a flawed capitalist system.”
It is tragic that the left has successfully rewritten history to demonize capitalism as the source of poverty rather than the great engine of unprecedented prosperity it has been for the United States, the Western world and beyond.
Kivel identified the third problem as Christianity’s conflict with “global warming,” wrote Neff, “because under Christianity mankind has dominion over the Earth, rather than requiring that humans treat the Earth itself as ‘sacred.’” Interestingly, Kivel is lexiconically challenged, as he failed to use the proper terminology for this vexing menace — “climate change.”
The Bible gives man dominion over all other living things (Genesis 1:28), but it does not sanction man’s abuse of the environment or other creatures. The Bible does not exhort mankind to deify “Mother Earth” as radical environmentalists do. But it does promote prudent stewardship, from the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) to God’s commanding that the fields and vineyards be sown and harvested for six years but left fallow in the seventh year to replenish the soil’s nutrients (Exodus 23:10-11 and Leviticus 25:1-7).
Christianity, argued Kivel, also orients us to distinguish between good and evil, which forces us to adopt a “with us or against us” mentality. “There’s nothing inherently good or bad about the weather or about people,” Kivel insisted.
I’ll concede that though the weather can be a destructive force, it is not capable of good or evil. But yes, the Bible definitely distinguishes between good and evil, and it is quite clear that all men are fallen.
Next, Kivel made the irrational leap that to distinguish between good and evil leads to condemnation of various things as worthy of destruction. From my perspective, however, it is not Christians but leftists such as Kivel who are most intolerant toward people and ideas of other religions or secularists.
Finally, Kivel castigated Christianity’s “hierarchical” views that place “God over people, men over women, parents over children, (and) white people over people of color,” which, in his view, inevitably leads to systems that justify or glorify oppression.
The Bible does — big surprise — place God (the Creator) over man (the creature), and it places parents over their children for the purpose of raising them through their formative years — an idea no doubt shocking to such leftists. But it does not teach that there are differences in human dignity; all people (male and female) are created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), which is intrinsically irrespective of race. It is rich for Kivel to argue that the Bible glorifies racial oppression when Christians were the leaders in the anti-slavery movement.
Before you dismiss all this as the thinking of a fringe leftist, please consider that it is a logical extension of “progressive” thinking that liberals, especially in the universities and the media, engage in every day. Indeed, it would be intellectually dishonest to deny that leftist race- and gender-baiting, as well as capitalism-bashing, permeate our university curricula throughout the United States. Everything involves identity categories — race, gender, income and the rest. Ironically, the left’s obsession over race, gender and the like tends to diminish, rather than promote, human dignity and individuality.
Despite the skewed thinking and propaganda of leftists such as Kivel, Christianity, as abundant evidence demonstrates, has been a force of good in this world and continues to be.
This article was originally posted at the Stream.org
In an act of extraordinary hypocrisy, PayPal, which last month announced its plans to expand into Cuba, has decided not to expand into North Carolina because the state is determined to keep its public bathrooms and locker rooms safe.
PayPal has now sent a loud and clear message to America: The common sense values of conservative Americans should be scorned; the destructive values of Cuban Communists, including decades of human rights abuses that continue to this hour, should be embraced.
I say it’s time to send a message to PayPal. Perhaps we can communicate most clearly to them through our money?
According to PayPal’s president and CEO, Dan Schulman, North Carolina’s HB2 is a violation of his company’s “deepest values.”
As he explained in a written statement, “This decision [not to open new offices in Charlotte] reflects PayPal’s deepest values and our strong belief that every person has the right to be treated equally, and with dignity and respect. These principles of fairness, inclusion and equality are at the heart of everything we seek to achieve and stand for as a company. And they compel us to take action to oppose discrimination.”
Schulman’s statement is not just dripping with hypocrisy. It is absolutely saturated with it.
First, PayPal made its plans to open new offices in Charlotte many months before the Charlotte bathroom bill was passed in February (and subsequently overturned). In other words, six months ago or one year ago, when all the laws were exactly as they are today, PayPal was quite happy to do business in Charlotte.
HB2 simply reversed a wrong-headed, potentially dangerous bill and put things back exactly as they were two months ago.
This begs the question: If the current law, which is identical with previous statutes, is so bad, why was PayPal so eager to do business in Charlotte before? Why is today different from one year ago? And who was stopping PayPal from setting up whatever standards it wanted in its own buildings and among its own employees?
Second, HB2 ensures that men cannot use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms in public buildings, meaning that heterosexual predators cannot use transgender bathroom access as a means to carry out their own voyeuristic (or worse) acts. (For those who deny that such things take place, please take a few minutes to watch this video.)
In short, because of HB2, a man cannot claim to be a woman and walk into the women’s locker room of the local YMCA where women and girls are showering and changing. Yet PayPal wants to defend the “rights” of the gender-confused male rather than protect more than 99% of the population that does not identify as transgender.
What kind of madness is this?
And what about the rights of the all-too-many female rape victims, some of whom have expressed horror at the thought that biological males who identify as females could share their bathrooms or, even worse, locker rooms and shower stalls? (Stop and think about the insanity of all this. How can this even be an issue?)
Mr. Schulman, I urge you to take a minute to read this article, “A Rape Survivor Speaks Out About Transgender Bathrooms.” Then come back and tell me that you are really concerned about treating everyone equally with dignity and respect. In fact, look this rape victim in the face and tell her.
Third, HB2 protects the Constitutional liberties of the people of North Carolina by not forcing a Muslim or Christian or Mormon or Jew to violate his or her religious convictions.
Consequently, just as no one would think that a Muslim caterer should be forced to cater a wedding with pork or a religious Jewish baker should be forced to photograph a wedding on the Sabbath, under HB2, a Christian baker could not be forced to bake a cake for a homosexual “wedding” ceremony.
What could be more basic than this? And would anyone dare argue that when our Founding Fathers guaranteed our religious liberties in the very first amendment of the Bill of Rights, what they really meant was, “Your liberties are guaranteed unless they come in conflict with homosexual activism”? Really!
This further underscores the extreme hypocrisy of PayPal, along with quite a few other major American companies, since they express their righteous indignation against HB2 while announcing their partnership with countries like Cuba.
How, pray tell, does Cuba treat its LGBT population?
And what of PayPal’s working relationship with many countries in Africa and Asia that forbid homosexual practice and imprison or even execute practicing homosexuals?
It seems that what really matters to PayPal is money and political correctness, and while we can’t stop them from acting hypocritically, we can send a message by directing our business elsewhere. Why not send a PayPal a loud and clear message by taking action with your money today?
The safety and security of our women and children and the protection of our most fundamental liberties will not be scorned without consequence.
This article was originally posted at TheStream.org.
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Aleister Crowley, Satanic priest and paragon to Alfred Kinsey, father of modern sex education
Order and anarchy. Good and evil. Truth and lies. Natural sexuality (within marriage) and homosexuality (of any kind).
The contrast is bright as day is to night. While Christ repeatedly condemned all “sexual immorality” as defined in the Old Testament Jewish moral code (which includes homosexual behavior), God’s Word, throughout both the Old and New Testaments, specifically denounces as evil rising to the level of “a detestable sin” all same-sex sexual conduct – be it “loving, monogamous and committed,” or otherwise.
Leviticus 18:22, for instance, admonishes, in no uncertain terms: “Do not practice homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman. It is a detestable sin.”
1 Corinthians 6:9 warns: “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality.”
Yet deceived they are, and without the Kingdom of God they remain.
Indeed, today there persists a burgeoning racket of apostate biblical revisionists who rationalize sexual sin. Notwithstanding a level of deception rooted in a deeply heartfelt and genuinely emotional variety of wishful thinking, the Holy Bible, thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology nonetheless remain incontrovertible: Unrepentant homosexual behavior is, always has been and always will be 100 percent and irredeemably wrong.
Still, few people realize that there is a “Bible” that not only affirms homosexuality (all forms of sexual immorality, in fact), but that goes so far as to make sin the centerpiece of its doctrine – its “golden rule,” if you will.
In his fantastic new book, “Gay Awareness: Discovering the Heart of the Father and the Mind of Christ On Sexuality,” author and minister Landon Schott devotes an entire chapter to this “gay”-affirming “Bible.” “[O]ut of the 31,102 verses in the Bible,” he writes, “not one supports a homosexual lifestyle in any way – not one. If you are still looking for a scripture that supports homosexuality you need to close your Holy Bible and open The Satanic Bible!”
That’s right. The Satanic Bible is the only “gay-affirming” Bible in existence (save a handful of heretical and intentionally mistranslated Bible counterfeits).
Schott quotes The Satanic Bible verbatim:
“Satanism condones any type of sexual activity which properly satisfies your individual desires, be it heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or even asexual, if you choose. Satanism also sanctions any fetish or deviation which will enhance your sex life, so long as it involves no one who does not wish to be involved.”
Satanism? Sounds more like the “values neutral” “comprehensive sex education” curriculum pushed on children in most of today’s public schools.
Contrast this with Christianity. Romans 13:13-14, for example, commands, “Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts.”
“Satan’s existence is consumed with a mission,” continues Schott, “to defy and mock God, to defy His order of creation, and to mock His governing orders. … The Church of Satan reverses the order of the Lord’s Prayer, saying it backwards as they begin their services, to defy God. God says love; the Church of Satan says hate. God says heterosexual relationships; the Church of Satan says homosexual relationships. God says monogamous marriage between a man and woman; the Church of Satan says polygamous and sexually open relationships. God gave the Ten Commandments; the Church of Satan established their version, called the Nine Tenets, shown below:”
Consider The Satanic Bible’s following sex-centric passages. They read like the mission statements of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) or GLSEN:
“That last verse from The Satanic Bible,” observes Schott, “reminds me of a powerful proverb on the adulterous woman. Proverbs 30:20 says, ‘This is the way of an adulterous woman: She eats and wipes her mouth and says, “I’ve done nothing wrong.”‘ Again and again The Satanic Bible tells its readers that there is nothing wrong with giving in to your natural sexual desires. The Bible tells us to resist the sexual desires of the flesh,” he concludes.
Schott points out, and I agree wholeheartedly, that homosexual practitioners are not necessarily demonic (or demon possessed) and that they are desperately in need of Christ’s Truth, in love, as well as much prayer.
Even so, it remains true that homosexual sin is demonic.
All good things come from God the Father, and all wickedness comes from the father of lies. If God designed biblical marriage and natural human sexuality, and He did, then we are left no doubt as to who designed its counterfeit – as to who fabricated pagan “gay marriage” and otherwise perverted God’s perfect purposes for human sexuality.
Sin is from Satan. Homosexual behavior is sin. Therefore, homosexual behavior is from Satan.
Yes, “gay marriage” is evil.
Yes, homosexuality is evil.
For the Bible – and The Satanic Bible – tells me so.
The new sexual morality did not emerge from a vacuum. Massive intellectual changes at the worldview level over the last 200 years set the stage for the revolution in which we currently find ourselves. We are living in times rightly, if rather awkwardly, described as the Late Modern Age. Just a decade ago, we spoke of the Postmodern Age, as if modernity had given way to something fundamentally new. Like every new and self-declared epoch, the Postmodern Age was declared to be a form of liberation. Whereas the Modern Age announced itself as a secular liberation from a Christian authority that operated on claims of divine revelation, the Postmodern Age was proposed as a liberation from the great secular authorities of reason and rationality. The Postmodern Age, it was claimed, would liberate humanity by operating with an official “incredulity toward all metanarratives.” In other words, postmodernity denied all of the big narratives that had previously shaped the culture and specifically put an end to the Christian narrative.
And yet, postmodern thought eventuated, as all intellectual movements must, in its own metanarrative. Then it just passed away. We still speak of postmodern thinking, even as we speak rightly of postmodern architecture and postmodern art, but we are speaking, for the most part, of a movement that has given way and given up. In retrospect, the Postmodern Age was not a new age at all; it was only the alarm that announced the end of Modernity and the beginning of the Late Modern Age. Modernity has not disappeared. It has only grown stronger, if also more complex.
The claim that humanity can only come into its own and overcome various invidious forms of discrimination by secular liberation is not new, but it is now mainstream. It is now so common to the cultures of Western societies that it need not be announced, and often is not noticed. Those born into the cultures of late modernity simply breathe these assumptions as they breathe the atmosphere, and their worldviews are radically realigned, even if their language retains elements of the old worldview.
The background to this great intellectual shift is the secularization of Western societies. Modernity has brought many cultural goods, but it has also, as predicted, brought a radical change in the way citizens of Western societies think, feel, relate, and reason. The Enlightenment’s liberation of reason at the expense of revelation was followed by a radical anti-supernaturalism that can scarcely be exaggerated. Looking at Europe and Great Britain, it is clear that the Modern Age has alienated an entire civilization from its Christian roots, along with Christian moral and intellectual commitments. This did not happen all at once, of course, though the change came very quickly in nations such as France and Germany. Scandinavian nations now register almost imperceptible levels of Christian belief. Increasingly, the same is also true of Great Britain. Sociologists now speak openly of the death of Christian Britain—and the evidence of Christian decline is abundant.
Some prophetic voices recognized the scale and scope of the intellectual changes taking place in the West. Just over thirty years ago, Francis Schaeffer wrote of a shift in worldview away from one that was at least vaguely Christian in the memory of society towards a completely different way of looking at the world. This new worldview was based on the idea that final reality was impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance. Significantly, Schaeffer observed that Christians in his time did not see this new worldview as taking the place of the Christian worldview that had previously dominated northern European and American cultures, either by personal conviction or cultural impression. These two worldviews, one generally Christian and the other barely deistic stood in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in moral results. These contrary ways of seeing the world would lead to very different sociological and governmental results, including the conception and implementation of law.
In 1983, writing just a few years after Francis Schaeffer made that contribution, Carl F. H. Henry described the situation and future possibilities in terms of a strict dichotomy:
“If modern culture is to escape the oblivion that has engulfed the earlier civilizations of man, the recovery of the will of the self-revealed God in the realm of justice and law is crucially imperative. Return to pagan misconceptions of divinized rulers, or a divinized cosmos, or a quasi-Christian conception of natural law or natural justice will bring inevitable disillusionment. Not all pleas for transcendent authority will truly serve God or man. By aggrandizing law and human rights and welfare to their sovereignty, all manner of earthly leaders eagerly preempt the role of the divine and obscure the living God of Scriptural revelation. The alternatives are clear: we return to the God of the Bible or we perish in the pit of lawlessness.”[1]
Writing even earlier, Carl Henry had already identified the single greatest intellectual obstacle to a cultural return to the God of the Bible. Released in 1976, Henry’s first volume of his six-volume magnum opus, God, Revelation, and Authority, began with this first line: “No fact of contemporary Western life is more evident than the growing distrust of final truth and its implacable questioning of any sure word.”[2] This obstacle to the return to the authority of a Christian worldview is really part of a vicious circle that begins with the departure from at least a cultural impression of God’s revealed authority. Leaving a Christian worldview leads to a distrust of final truth and a rejection of universal authority, which then blockades the way back to the God of the Bible.
Read Part 1 — Secularization and the Sexual Revolution
ARTICLE CITATIONS
[1] Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 6, God Who Stands and Says Part 2 (Wheaton: Crossway, 1999), 454.
[2] Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1, God Who Speaks and Shows, Preliminary Considerations (Wheaton: Crossway, 1999), 1.
This article was originally posted at AlbertMohler.com
“He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.” ~1 Peter 22-25
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“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.” ~John 3:16-21
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“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” ~Romans 5:6-10
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“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” ~1 Peter 2:24
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“But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.” ~Isaiah 53:5
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“For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” ~Matthew 12:40
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“And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.” ~Mark 8:31
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“After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” ~John 19:28-30
Written by Dr. Russell Moore
This year my organization joined with our Roman Catholic allies in filing a legal brief with the U.S. Supreme Court asking the court to uphold Texas’ laws regulating the abortion industry. That isn’t all that surprising. After all, Catholics and evangelicals have been working together for decades to uphold the sanctity of human life. What was surprising was that an opposing brief, filed by a Baptist church, argued that legal abortion is moral and just.
In a Baptist News Global article, the church’s senior minister Donna Schaper defended Planned Parenthood by saying that those of us who oppose abortion are “having a hard time dealing with women as moral agents and as adults.” I thought I recognized her name, and after I looked about I found that I had written about this pastor a decade ago, when she admitted that abortion is murder.
In 2006, Schaper wrote an article about the abortion she had. She wrote that her abortion was the right choice since she and her husband had young twins at the time. “Because women are mature sexual beings who make choices, birth control and abortion are positive moral forces in history,” she wrote. “They allow sex to be both procreational and recreational, for both men and women.”
What was striking to me at the time was that Schaper did not rely on the standard abortion advocacy arguments of the unborn child as a “clump of tissue” or a “mass of cells.” Instead, she called her abortion murder, and spoke of her unborn child as a child. She even named her “Alma,” which means “soul.”
“I happen to agree that abortion is a form of murder,” she wrote. “I think the quarrel about when life begins is disrespectful to the fetus. I know I murdered the life within me.”
“I could have loved that life but I chose not to,” she continued. “I did what men do all the time when they take us to war: they choose violence because, while they believe it is bad, it is still better than the alternatives.”
“When I made my choice to end Alma’s life, I was behaving as an adult,” the pastor concluded. “It was a human life. That’s why we named her, wanted her, but also knew we knew we did not want her enough.”
These words would be chilling coming from anyone. They are especially chilling coming from a pastor of a church. Add to the horror of it all that this church is named for the most beloved Baptist missionary couple of all time, Ann and Adoniram Judson. The Judsons sacrificed their very lives to take the gospel of life to those beyond the ocean. In the pulpit named for them stands a woman who speaks of violence to a defenseless infant in her womb, not in repentance but without apology.
The lessons to be learned here are not just one more reminder of what happens when doctrinal orthodoxy and ethical accountability are lost. We can see that all over the place. What is to be learned here, I think, is that the terms of the abortion debate are deeper than we think. We often assume that the debate is about when life begins. We marshal our scientific and philosophical and biblical arguments about the personhood of the unborn child. And we should continue to do so. But we should also remember that this alone will not end the debate, The problem, after all, is not one of information.
I suspect there are many who share this pastor’s views, though many would be loathe to say so publicly. They know the unborn child is just that: a child, a human being. They know that abortion is an act of violence. But they would rather this violence than the alternative. Behind that is a Nietzschean vision of morality, in which the will to power devours everything in its sight, especially the weak and the vulnerable.
To confront this, we must articulate and embody a different sort of universe, the one Jesus reveals and makes true. We must articulate and embody a kingdom where violence is not a sign of one being a “grown up,” a kingdom where one enters as a vulnerable child. When we refuse to define people in terms of their usefulness, when we bear witness to the image of God in all people, including the most vulnerable, we will find ourselves at odds with a world that sees power, and the violence that maintains it, as all that matters.
The Supreme Court will decide this particular case, of whether the abortion industry should be essentially self-regulating. But we should remember that, in the pile of briefs before them, there’s a church named for missionaries that stands, in its own words, on the side of violence. We must speak to those who hear in that sort of violence a kind of “good news,” a counter-gospel that is attractive to the spirit of the age. And we must hold out a witness for life and for peace and for justice, inside and outside the womb.
This article was originally posted at RussellMoore.com
A group of Illinois lawmakers is seeking divine intervention as the state budget stalemate lingers. Members of the Legislative Prayer Caucus are asking for prayers as they work to find solutions to the state’s fiscal and moral problems…and they are reaffirming that it is in God they trust.
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What a mess our world is in. What a mess America is in. What a mess the church is in.
Depressed yet?
Isaiah 5:20 encapsulates, I believe, the cultural condition of much of the world, most of America and an alarmingly high percentage of those who belong, or at least claim to belong, to the body of Christ. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
Calling evil good. That sums us up.
But, hey, “grace,” right? I mean, you’ve seen the bumper sticker. “Christ’s grace is sufficient,” isn’t it?
Well, yes and no. Christ’s grace is sufficient to give us His strength in our own pathetic weakness and to impute his perfect righteousness to us, despite our own filthy and fallen nature (see 2 Corinthians 12:9).
But strength to do what, exactly? Strength to continue sinning?
Hell no.
Understand that by “hell no,” I don’t mean “hell” in a crass, swear word, Donald Trumpy kind of way. I mean that to continue sinning in an unrepentant, guilt-free, “evil is good” manner, leads to death. It leads to physical, emotional and spiritual death, whether you call yourself a “Christian” or not.
It leads to hell.
“Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey – whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (Romans 6:16-19).
So, in order to be “set free from sin” we must “obey.” To stop sinning is to obey. To continue sinning is to disobey. To disobey leads to death – it makes us “slaves to sin.” To obey, to stop sinning, leads to life. It makes us “slaves to righteousness.”
What does it mean to be “set free from sin”? Well, it means, as Christ admonished, that we are, among other things, to “go and sin no more” (see John 8:11). Sin, with its associated chains of bondage, is over there. We are over here. Sin is behind us. We’ve “put off [our] old self, which belongs to [our] former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires,” and, thusly, are “set free from sin” (see Ephesians 4:22).
Jesus said, “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).
“Hmm,” you might say. “I don’t recall my pastor ever saying anything about ‘turning from my wicked ways’ in order for Jesus to ‘forgive [my] sin and heal [our] wicked land.’ What did Christ mean by ‘turn from their wicked ways?’”
Well, after centuries of robust debate, a debate, mind you, that rages on even today within the body of Christ, an ever-so-slight majority consensus has emerged that maintains the following, rather nuanced and theologically highbrow thesis:
Jesus meant to turn from your wicked ways.
Best-selling Christian author Randy Alcorn once wrote, “Any concept of grace that makes us feel more comfortable sinning is not biblical grace. God’s grace never encourages us to live in sin; on the contrary, it empowers us to say no to sin and yes to truth.”
We can all agree that, when we repent and ask His forgiveness, Jesus forgives us our past sins. Still, there is a deceptive tendency in much of the church – and by “deceptive,” I mean demonic – that suggests Christ came to set us, captives to sin without Him each and every one, free, not from sin, but, rather, from guilt for that sin.
This, of course, is yak manure. Jesus did not come, nor was He tortured to death on a tree, so that, by His grace, He could kill our guilty feelings for ongoing, habitual and unrepented-for sins.
Jesus came to kill sin.
“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Romans 6:1-2).
It is hellacious error to say that, as Christians, we are not supposed to “feel guilty” when we sin. When you sin, you feel guilty because you are guilty. Feeling guilty, otherwise known as “being convicted” in our sin, is a painful symptom of a dying soul. Christ’s grace is not spiritual Percocet intended to numb the pain of guilt. Guilt is the warning sign, sin is the cancer and Christ’s grace, the cure.
There is a deceptive, deadly, and evil brand of false “grace” out there, prevalent within the Christian church. It’s a grace that says yes to sin and no to truth, that calls evil good and good evil. A guilt-free, prideful, “gay”-affirming, gossiping, slothful, “pro-choice,” kids will be kids, always use protection, God will forgive my abortion, nicer than Jesus kind of grace that is leading millions of people who honestly believe they’re saved, born-again Christians, straight to the flaming pits of eternal damnation.
Too much “hellfire and brimstone” for you, my friend? Well, sorry. I care about your soul. I care about your eternity – even if your false-teacher, likely-bound-for-hell-himself pastor, priest or bishop doesn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not self-righteous. To the contrary, under my own power, and in my flesh, I lack a righteous bone in my entire body. I’m the worst sinner of all.
Even so, through the amazing and perfect power of the Holy Spirit, I am able to call sin sin, evil evil and good good. I am able to recognize sin in my own life, sin in the life of our once-great nation, and sin in the life of the church. I can then repent and, with and through the Holy Spirit, “go and sin no more.”
That’s it. That’s what God requires. That’s true grace.
And that kind of grace is sufficient.
You’ve heard the old adage, “Love the sinner hate the sin.” Some complain that it’s found nowhere in the Bible.
True, not word-for-word, anyway. Still, this transcendent truth, this overall concept, is found throughout the Holy Scriptures. We are literally commanded to hate evil.
“Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the LORD God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. Hate evil, love good…” (Amos 5:14-15).
So, there you have it. That’s grace. Love Jesus. Love others. Hate evil. Repent and “go and sin no more.”
Now get moving.
And Christ be with you.
The American Bible Society’s fifth annual State of the Bible survey of 2,000 Americans has some interesting findings. Not everything in the extensive poll is discouraging. In fact many findings are very encouraging and perhaps courter-cultural compared to the Hollywood and media narrative.
For example over 60% of Americans say that they would like to read the Bible more than they do. Nearly 8 in 10 (79%) say that the Bible is sacred literature or holy. That’s nearly eight-times higher than the next most frequently mentioned holy book, the Koran (10%). The Torah is considered sacred by 7% followed with 4% for the Book of Mormon.
Here’s more:
There was a lot of information in this poll about reading habits and the influence of the Bible, but one sentence in the summary really shocked me. “One-quarter of adults say they never hear the Bible read aloud at a church service or Mass.”
Spread over all the churches, this could mean that the Bible is not even being quoted in one-in-four services on any given weekend. That’s dumbfounding and almost incomprehensible. As much as anything else, this Biblical void in churches may explain a whole lot about the condition of our culture and the Biblical illiteracy of America, (which this poll also revealed.)
Earlier this month, a group of Marine Corps and Army generals dropped a bombshell on an unsuspecting U.S. Senate committee. In doing so, they opened a can of worms that our society desperately wants to keep closed: the one containing the real-world consequences of denying the innate differences between men and women.
General Robert Neller, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, in response to a question from Missouri U.S. Senator Clair McCaskill told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I think that all eligible and qualified men and women should register for the draft.”
Neller’s position was seconded by General Mark Milley, the Army Chief of Staff.
While their responses delighted McCaskill, it put the current secretaries of the Navy and Army in an awkward position. While the Obama administration has pushed for the full integration of women into combat roles, it has not come out in favor of requiring women to register for the draft when they turn eighteen.
The problem is that in opening up combat roles for women, the Obama administration has removed the only legal justification for treating men and women differently when it comes to the draft.
In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this differential treatment on the grounds that “the purpose of registration was to prepare for a draft of combat troops.” Since women were excluded from combat, they could be excluded from registration. Doing away with the exclusion from combat logically leads to taking away any exclusion from the draft.
Andrew Walker of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is absolutely correct when he wrote that the proposal to make women register for the draft isn’t just a military proposal; “it’s about an entire worldview built on the bankrupt ideology of egalitarianism.”
This ideology denies that there are any meaningful differences between men and women, and that all legal and cultural distinctions are impermissible discrimination against women, even when women are the beneficiaries of these distinctions.
This ideology has led to what Walker has called our culture’s “weakened understanding of masculinity that makes male obligation optional if women are willing to do the duty of men.” This weakened understanding is reflected in public opinion polls showing that strong majorities favor allowing women in combat units.
It’s against this cultural setting, and the “tectonic shift” it represents, that we must see this proposal. A society that is increasingly reluctant to make men fulfill their obligations as husbands and fathers is, not surprisingly, increasingly reluctant to make them fulfill their obligation to protect those in need of protection.
Let me be clear: I’m not against requiring young people to perform public service, whether in the military or in some other capacity. And I wouldn’t dare imply that women aren’t as tough or as capable as men. As a happily married man and the father of a talented daughter, I can tell you that if anything, the opposite is true.
But subjecting women to the military draft ignores the way God created us, male and female. As Walker says, “God didn’t make us automatons. He didn’t make us asexual monads. He made us gendered, embodied, and different. The differences extend to all levels of our being—our emotional, physical, and psychological selves. The Christian tradition finds these differences beautiful; and we embrace them with glad acceptance.”
And because we Christians embrace these beautiful differences, we should vigorously oppose drafting women into the military. It’s a bad idea—one that would sacrifice our daughters on the altar of an ugly ideology.
Read more:
Experimental barbarism: Why drafting women is wrong
Andrew Walker | erlc.com | February 8, 2016
Threats Of Drafting Women Reveal The Lies Of Equality
D.C. McAllister | The Federalist | February 8, 2016
This article was originally posted at BreakPoint.org
On the 26th of this month, legendary singer/song-writer and iced-cool customer Johnny Cash would have celebrated his 85th birthday. Even as I write, his live version of “Folsom Prison Blues” click-clacks through my earbuds like a Southern Pacific boxcar over oily railroad ties.
The memories abound. We were “The Treetops,” a not-so-legendary middle school garage band from the sticks outside Norman, Oklahoma. I was the drummer, and “Folsom Prison,” our very first song, sounded pretty dang tight, what, with the concrete acoustics in our two-car studio and all. My buddy Chad Usry (man, could that cat play guitar) did a great imitation of the Man in Black – great to a seventh-grader, anyhow.
Like October leaves, the winds of time, as they say, scattered The Treetops down dusty roads far-removed. Sadly, I learned a few years back that Chad ended up sentenced to his own Folsom Prison for a series of burglaries and violent crimes. He’ll have 40 years in this self-wrought wilderness to cry out to God for a second chance at life.
Few know it, but Johnny Cash, late in his own life, and likewise wandering a wilderness of his own making, cried out to God in a big way. He had to. Or else die.
The Creator of the universe answered. “God cut him down,” as it were. The Lord of Lords and King of Kings freely and graciously offered Johnny Cash a second, third and 77th chance at redemption.
And so Johnny believed.
And Johnny accepted.
“I believe what I say, but that don’t necessarily make me right,” Cash told Rolling Stone in 2000, laughing that deep, raspy, hard-livin’ laugh. “There’s nothing hypocritical about it. There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right upfront that I’m the biggest sinner of them all.”
And a hard-drinking, pill-popping, womanizing sinner he was.
As sinners we are.
“I used drugs to escape, and they worked pretty well when I was younger. But they devastated me physically and emotionally – and spiritually … [they put me] in such a low state that I couldn’t communicate with God. There’s no lonelier place to be. I was separated from God, and I wasn’t even trying to call on Him. I knew that there was no line of communication. But He came back. And I came back.”
Cash lived firsthand the transcendent reality, available to all, “that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (see Romans 8:38-39).
In his 2003 book, “The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash,” author and music critic Dave Urbanski wrote, “A writer once tried to paint Cash into a corner, baiting him to acknowledge a single denominational persuasion at the center of his heart. Finally, Cash laid down the law: ‘I – as a believer that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, the Christ of the Greeks, was the Anointed One of God (born of the seed of David, upon faith as Abraham has faith, and it was accounted to him for righteousness) – am grafted onto the true vine, and am one of the heirs of God’s covenant with Israel.’
“‘What?’ the writer replied.
“‘I’m a Christian,’ Cash shot back. ‘Don’t put me in another box.'”
Confusing? For Johnny Cash it wasn’t. For the Christ follower it isn’t. “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
So was Cash a Christian “fundamentalist”? It would seem so. He once wrote, “Please understand that I believe the Bible, the whole Bible, to be the infallible, indisputable Word of God. I have been careful to take no liberties with the timeless Word.”
“Being a Christian isn’t for sissies,” he once said. “It takes a real man to live for God – a lot more man than to live for the devil, you know? If you really want to live right these days, you gotta be tough.”
Yeah, tough as “a boy named Sue.”
“If you’re going to be a Christian, you’re going to change,” Cash continued. “You’re going to lose some old friends, not because you want to, but because you need to.”
To be sure, they may even hate you for it. Still, and as Christ warned, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If 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. Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me” (John 15:18-21).
“The gospel of Christ must always be an open door with a welcome sign for all,” concluded Cash. Indeed, he was right. But his observation did not derive from a vacuum. “Then Jesus said, ‘Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
Johnny Cash walked through that open door.
And he’s at rest.
My friends, you never know when it may arrive. Sometimes it’s early, sometimes it’s late, but it’s always right on time. So, before you hear that final “train a comin’, rollin’ ’round the bend,” take a moment to reflect on the storied life and deep Christian faith of the mythical Man in Black. Though he surely walked the line, as so many of us do, and, while he was indeed a Johnny come lately in his eternal walk with God, Johnny Cash finished well.
It’s never too late to finish well – to become a disciple for Christ.
Cash sang these words in one of his last songs, “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” recorded in 2003 in the final months of his life and released posthumously in 2010: “When I hear that trumpet sound, I’m gonna rise right out of the ground. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down. … Well, meet me, Jesus, meet me. Meet me in the middle of the air. And if these wings don’t fail me, I will meet you anywhere.”
Like Johnny Cash, you need only ask.
And Christ will meet you anywhere.