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Be More Heavenly Minded, You'll Do More Earthly Good


Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. (I Peter 2:11-12)

            Romans accused early Christians of cannibalism, but apparently noticed how much Christians loved one another and that the Christians were willing to die for their beliefs. When plagues ravaged Europe and north Africa, Christians nursed sick and dying pagans, knowing that they might also die as a result. One of the things I love about history is that once you get past the nonsense of names, dates, and place you had to memorize for school tests, history is filled with stories of people and ideas.  If you scratch below the surface of those stories, you often find Christianity at the heart of much of the best and brightest, not only in Europe, but found in higher frequency in "the West." Want a sample of this? Read How The Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill, or any book you can find by Rodney Stark. Pick up his book, America's Blessings to get an idea of contemporary society. 
           I've been told more than once that I am "too heavenly minded to be any earthly good." It's not a true description of me, but it provided the justification the speaker needed to continue being worldly-minded. Shouldn't those who are the most heavenly minded be those who do the most earthly good? Oh, those around us may not say it now, but when they stand before God, our behavior should take away their excuse of ignorance. We should be the most loving, most informed, most charitable, most  responsive and responsible, most educated, most civically involved, law-abiding (so long as civil law does not violate God's law) people in the country. 
            We have work to do. Christians permitted others to take over medicine, science, education, charity and the family. We allowed them to take over much more than those, but those four, it seems to me, are the areas in which we most need to focus our attention. For some of these, it takes one or more degrees to have an influence, but you can work on yourself and your family now. You can do charitable work now. You can get involved in your schools and school boards now. You can start being a better neighbor now. You can begin today, if you have children, to prepare them to take a Christian perspective into their careers. The problem with all of these things is that they take focus, they take attention, they take close encounters with oppressive ideologies. They take not abandoning the field of battle when those ideologies claim the victory before the fight has even begun.

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