06/20/2024
Hope and Grace Fellowship
Operation Healing America
“From Our House to the White House”
Letter to the American Church
What is the Church?
See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over to enter and possess. I call heaven heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have before you life and death, blessings and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the Lord swore to your father, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them.
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Problems within the Churches.
We have see how outrageous it is the this has happened. The How could the government in putting fourth the so-called “Johnson Amendment” far to draw any lines around what could be said in a sermon-in which God’s own Word is to be delivered? What could conceivably be more deserving of complete freedom than that form-amid all forms-of public speech? (Trump Desolved it and the Churches stayed silent), and if the conscience of man of God in the pulpit would cause him to speak for or against a candidate, what is that pulpit would cause him to speak for at against a candidate, what is that to the U.S. government? In fact, it is none of its business.
Have we forgotten that pastors in the eighteenth century spoke boldly for their colonial pulpits against the tyranny of King George III, and opposed him by name? Was it not their voices that helped us to gain our freedoms and that helped us to create a Constitution in which all our freedoms were enshrined in a way that had been the envy of the whole world ever since? Were pastors from their American pulpits in the nineteenth century not allowed to speak against those candidates who expressed racist and pro-slavery views? Did they not even have an obligation to educate their congregations on such things and to encourage them to choose leaders who shared God’s views? Finally, were pastors in the twentieth century not allowed to speak out against candidates who advocated for Jim Crow laws? Do we think they ought to have been?
This is no way for any Christians-much less a pastor-to parse what he may be “allowed” to say, and certainly not the pulpit l. It can only be God- and our conscience guided by Him-that can determine what we should and shouldn’t say. So our total freedom-in and beyond our pulpits-is nonnegotiable. The truth cannot be contained, and certainly not in categories that have been arbitrarily chosen and defined by others. So when did these pernicious ideas come in to America Churches? Perhaps the more important question is: why did Christians leaders submit to these in-Christians and un-American ideas? Amd why are they submitting to them today? Have so many pastor today really forgotten that it s God who calls the to their post, and God who fills their churches and keeps them filled? Have they forgotten why the scripture ls say: that if they honor God, He will honor them? Has keeping an eye on the bottom line and on the numbers in attendance caused them to drift away from the very reason Gid called them to the pulpit in the first place? Have they become like the leaders of American corporations, who have become especially cowardly and seen willing to say and do whatever someone advises them is necessary to avoid trouble and keep them from being”cancelled l”?
Have they blessings we have in America made us so comfortable and so soft that we have forgotten that Gid expects us to serve Him with everything we have, and that if we are in leadership, He requires us to to understand that our greater position of authority comes with even greater expectations? Of course, many American pastors probably never has this kind of heroic faith to begin with. And there are some who once had it, but over time have lost their first love and drifted to that awful point at which they are in danger of judgment, just as the German Christians in the 1930s and just as the Christians in Ephesus in the first century were. Will those among us who have lost our first love repent before it’s too late?
Pastor Lorin