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.
Comments
Post a Comment