Mere Christianity

As I reflect back on the last 20 months or so of the recently concluded election cycle, I must say that I was extremely disappointed with how the mainstream Christian community conducted our selves. I can’t tell you how many emails I received that were part of some smear campaign based on outright lies, fear mongering, and distorted facts. I was even more disturbed by the number of Christian friends and colleagues who fell prey to this practice and blindly forwarded these outright lies and misleading messages that were so obviously written by campaign staffers or ultra-conservative, politically motivated ideologues with no other agenda but to smear and destroy the opposition to dozens of friends and colleagues without so much as moments hesitation. We allowed our good sense and Christian morality to be hijacked by politically motivated thugs. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

I have been a life-long independent voter and have never aligned myself with any political party. However, I understand it is the right of every citizen of this nation to do so if they desire. But it is absolutely un-Christian to try and turn our Christian faith and the church in general into an arm of any political party; left or right. As Christians, we must remain completely independent of the political system.

As citizens, we have an obligation to make our voices be heard during the election, but only as individual citizens and voters. I defy anyone who considers themselves to be a Bible believing Christian to find one word in Christ’s commission to us, or the epistles of the apostles, where we were told to become part of the political process. In fact, we were told just the opposite.

There is no doubt that Christians in this nation (about 80,000,000 of us if polls are correct) make up a very powerful voting block. But that should only become evident on election-day as each of us who is eligible goes to our polling place and votes our individual conscience. We should never be offering collective “Christian” support or endorsements to any particular candidate or offering one red cent of money donated for the cause of Christ to be used in support of a political party or candidate. We should be the great unknown that the pollsters simply cannot figure out until after the fact when the votes have been cast.

The Christian church in America has been hijacked by the political process and we have stood by and watched as it has happened. Somehow, over the last 30-40 years, we have come to equate Christianity with conservatism, or patriotism, or capitalism, or Americanism, and it is shameful. We are called to be in the world but not of the world. We are told to not be concerned over such matters as who is in office and what laws we must live under. We are told that God alone rises leaders up and puts them down in His time for His purposes. We in the Christian church have somehow come to believe that we should be attempting to build a “Christian Nation” here in America. Anyone who truly studies history knows that we have never been a Christian nation and were not founded to be a Christian nation, nor are we called by the gospels or epistles to build a Christian nation. We just happen to have had several founding fathers who claimed to be Christian and therefore used a lot of Christian language in the documents that formed this Republic. But a close examination of most of their personal lives reveals them to have not been very “Christian” at all. We must take back the Church from the politicians and restore it to the mission Christ set before us at his ascension. The twenty-first century cannot be allowed to be the century in which the Church of Jesus Christ becomes the new Sadducee and Pharisee arms of the current government. We are perilously close to that today, and we must wake up to the truth and get back to tasks Christ has set before us.

I will have much more to say on this topic as time goes by, but for now I will leave you with this question. Please sit and think long and hard about this before you answer. “When Christ returns, what kind of government and economic system do you believe He will install and lead?”

Until next time – God Bless

If you would like to learn more of my essays or books based on the Book of Genesis, visit my website at http://thewitnesschronicles.com.

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