War is Upon You
I grew up in an America that would have seemed almost brutally typical. I grew up in Spokane, WA; not to be confused with the odd city folk and their cloudy weather and collectivist park experiments across the state in Seattle. We lived in what acted and behaved like a midwestern town. It was home, it was deeply patriotic, there was a basic sense that most folks were on the same page with law and order, behavior, etc. Sin was rampant like any other city, but people knew for the most part what it was.
I would mow yards in the summer, worked in the mall when I turned 15, and played football and ran track etc. I remember watching on our tv in the basement when 9/11 happened, and I think remembering seeing the second plane hit my freshman year of high school.
It was typically, American.
Since then I have lived in Sydney, Australia, New York City, and now reside in Orange County, CA.
I saw little inklings of the change that has taken place over the last few years as I have gone from living in one place and then another.
The common ground has become the shifting sands of moral relativism. The gods have become the same hedonistic gods of 1000s of year ago before Christianity built the west. People are the center of their own universe, the main character in their story, and it shows. The fractures are deep. I think deep enough to make the main point I wish to make here.
Many bible believing christians have found themselves living in a foreign land. Not to say there are still many places like where I grew up left in the United States. But many of our coastal states, and large cities in the interior, have a adopted a pagan, post christian worlview. The hilarity of it (because you have to laugh sometimes) is that the same ideas that Christianity confronted when Paul the Apostle walked the earth are the ideas that people have now.
Self is god. Self makes right and wrong. Self is king.
So, we, as believers, are now more than ever ambassadors from the Kingdom of Jesus, to a place where little gods reign, and where the hope of the gospel of Jesus can be heard for the first time in American ears.
The opportunity to turn the tables has NEVER BEEN GREATER. Christianity thrives and spreads where there is no anchor left in society.
We must begin to act like foreign missionaries. As regular believers, as ministers, we are on foreign territory. I have hope that whole cultures, and even the cultures of our most left leaning and progressive states will again look more biblical and good. But this will only happen if we get on offense, share the gospel, and make disciples like not one person around us has ever heard the gospel. We have to get on the warpath for souls like never before.
Many people are leaving my state, I know we are called here. Not just because of the perfect weather and the amazing national parks, the egregious cost of living, and brutally poor governance by Sacramento Supreme, but because there are so many souls here that need the hope of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
My wife and I first moved here with the mindset of missionaries to America. We saw the foundations crumbling. We saw the cellular family fracturing. We saw relativism creep in like a poison that slowly puts the population to sleep like poison. Making them just comfortable enough to be alive but never find truth and purpose. We saw the suicides skyrocketing, the church absorbing doctrines of demons and marxist ideology all wrapped and sugar coated in the word “justice”.
People need to be saved from cultish ideologies that will destroy them and in turn the society they live in. They need hope over cynicism, and rational though over raw emotion. They need purpose, not just pleasure. Jesus, the Word, is the answer.
It is the way we win the “culture war”. Preach the whole narrative of scripture, the total counsel of God, let it shape us, pray, and GO and make disciples. The preaching of the cross is the answer. No idea or “ism” comes close.
We all, have to be all in.
War is upon us. And what we decide to do will shape history. Will shape this nation.