Kreitsauce's Musings

Reality check, folks: everything matters. Everything. Your words and attitudes have direct consequences for yourself and those around you. Everything you say either builds up or tears down, and the believer is called to edify. Now, I know this conversation is used to tell people to be polite. Allow me to turn the argument on its head: it is never merciful to allow error to continue unchecked. It is never loving to overlook that which is dangerous. Love cannot bear evil to go unchecked in its object. You are not being nice when you leave sin unaddressed; you are being cruel.

Now that we got that out of the way, I move on to my second frustration: Christians think that what happens in the public sphere is of none of their concern. Imagine that! Christian secularists!!! It will never end well, folks, for us to sit on our hands and wait for the end. “This world is not my home, I’m just’a passing through” was never intended to encourage us to be apathetic- or maybe just pathetic- in our convictions. After all, if songs were supposed to be the foundation of our ideology, whatever happened to “This is my Father’s World”? If we believe abortion is wrong, we must condemn it- and condemn it strongly. If we believe that a sexual union and commitment between two people of the same sex is a perversion of the sacred, then we had better being doing our dead-level best to influence our government.

No, I don’t mean that we should be cruel or unkind. We should always be loving, but, remember what I already said: to permit that which is dangerous and sinful is cruel. If you love this country, it should vex you to see what goes on in it. If you at least care about the people of the country you live in, you ought to want to help them avoid sin. Now, some of you are going to go off the deep end on me. You’re going to say: “What about verses such as Proverbs 21:1, Dan 21:1, and Romans 9:17 that tell us that God is in control of government? Shouldn’t we just let Him do His job while we work on the Great Commission or something?” Well, I have a couple of responses to that:

1. Involvement in something other than government, law, and other aspects of the public square is not contradictory to concern for evangelism and discipleship. I would also add here that the Great Commission is not the only aspect of Christian responsibility. Otherwise, ditch you family and your job and spend the rest of your (most likely short) life winning folks and getting them into church! Oh, you’d have to revoke your citizenship, too, since that’s a part of human government.
2. Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Nehemiah, Daniel, Esther, and a host of other men and women of God were directly involved in influencing the course of their nation.
3. God gives everyone talents and responsibilities so that they may work. Work is by default a good thing because God intended for us to work. It’s a part of His creation. God’s idea of “work” is not limited to a job, but to that which creates, repairs, maintains, and produces. In a sense, everything except for recreation is work- even voluntary involvement in government.
4. We live in a nation that gives us direct access to our leaders. We can vote on the federal and local levels. We can call, email, and write our leaders. Just like Daniel and Esther, you and I have an audience with our leaders. They may not always do what is right, but we are responsible to do our best.
5. We live in a capitalist society, for the most part. For this reason, your dollar is your vote for the goods that ought to be produced. When you buy a CD or movie, you tell the producers you want more of that kind of product. “What you applaud you encourage, but beware what you celebrate, ” says Ravi Zacharias. What are you telling Hollywood?
6. Jesus didn’t limit His command for us to be salt and light to strictly evangelism, even though that is how we often portray it. No, He says that we must season the earth and light the world so that people will glorify God in Heaven. This can be done in many ways; naming the name of Christ must be done in even the highest places in the nation.

In fact, the use of the word “world” in Matthew 5 is interesting. “You are the light of the world”, Jesus says. The word “world” is from the Greek word “kosmos”. The Kosmos is defined as “constitution, order, and government”, “the human family”, “the universe and all of reality” and “world affairs”, according to my Greek lexicon. Interesting. We are supposed to be a light to law and government. How can we do so without informing those that work in such areas concerning Truth?

Which brings me to my last point. Truth matters. Either it is sacred and therefore must be protected, proclaimed, and defended, or it is unimportant and may be trampled under foot. For this reason, worldviews matter, for they are how people unintentionally interpret reality and Truth. Philosophy matters, for it is how people intentionally interpret reality and Truth. Apologetics matters, because it treats all Truth as God’s truth. There is no direction you and I can go in reality, no sphere into which we delve, in which God has not spoken. His Truth is everywhere. We can use His Truth, His world, His revelation of Himself through the cosmos to speak truth into people’s lives. If your concern is for evangelism and discipleship, you have no choice but to explore the world of philosophy, worldview, and apologetics.

Too many Christians are picking their one area, retreating into their hand-crafted shells of existence. Whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper, they are only concerned with themselves in the end. They do not want to learn. They do not want to expend energy. They’d rather go to task on only their one thing. We need people like Nehemiah in the Bible. He commanded his people to both defend and build. They took up sword and trowel to accomplish the task God had for them. We need to do the same- or get out of the way so someone else can.