The Last Days Of The Church XLVI

 The enemy’s camp is fully funded. It’s not on a shoestring budget or barely getting by; it is a financial powerhouse. In 2022 alone, the most prominent murder mill in the world, responsible for close to half a million innocent lives snuffed out before any of them could feel the sun on their face, had a revenue of over two billion dollars, with another two and a half billion dollars in assets. If money or the abundance thereof were the metric by which we measure God’s blessing, then we would have to conclude that the most ruthless and profane among the godless are blessed beyond measure.

That the devil’s minions would attempt to throw money around to buy influence, acceptance, and validation is not uncommon or unexpected. Every time they’ve needed the masses to be nudged one way or another by those they deemed their spiritual betters, their willingness to throw legal tender at the problem was evident. The only unknown was the number of zeroes it would take to make it a reality, but they figured that one out soon enough. For some, it didn’t even take a big check, just the promise of rubbing elbows with the influential and revered.

I’m sure they justified it to themselves somehow, whether via the greater good theory or the underlying belief that the sheep just didn’t know what was good for them and so must be made to see the light of reason. Big names with big churches and big platforms sold out and, if necessary, even brought Jesus into the mix, insisting that He, too, would comply with mandates and tyrants if given half the chance.

If your convictions are for sale to the highest bidder, then there is neither stability, steadfastness, nor undeterred purposefulness in your heart. We’ve seen it all too often, wherein men are turned to and fro depending on which way the wind is blowing on a particular day, and their principles are situational and given to change at the drop of a hat.

Each will have an explanation for the hard turn, whether it’s a change of heart or an evolution in the way they see the world. Some of the slimier ones resort to using love and tolerance as a distraction from their cowardice, conveniently glossing over the fact that God didn’t have a change of heart or evolve to greater enlightenment; they just thought they knew better than Him, or whatever the godless were offering was worth the betrayal.

And yet, we keep defending the indefensible because we don’t want to deal with the reality that the men we’ve put our faith in have betrayed it, and those we trusted to provide spiritual sustenance have been dripping venom into our hearts for countless years.

Our first mistake was putting our trust in men. Our second mistake was believing them over the words of scripture. If you’ve ever wondered how the modern-day church became what it is, those two choices were the beginning of our downfall. The more we hoped in men, the less we looked to Jesus, and the more our hearts were filled with the desire for the things of this earth, the less we yearned for the things above.

Paul wasn’t bold and steadfast because it was his nature. He became bold and steadfast because he had come to the knowledge of the truth of who Jesus is, and that gave him boldness to preach a risen Christ and steadfastness to endure all manner of hardship for His name’s sake.

Jesus makes us more than we are and gives us the necessary tools to overcome, persevere, and live out our calling as long as our focus is on Him and not ourselves. Men give in to cowardice because their comfort rather than Christ becomes the center of their universe. They give in to compromise because they’re unwilling to pay the cost of remaining faithful to Jesus when the road gets hard and the enemy gets vicious. It’s not that God can’t work through us; it’s that we rather He not because we deem the cost of being used by Him too much to bear.

We look at all the anecdotal evidence in the aggregate and conclude that given enough razzle-dazzle and sleight of hand, most people won’t even notice that we’re talking out both sides of our mouth, and little if any, of what we say stirs true commitment, repentance, and faithfulness to Christ in the hearts of those who hear us. What’s more, those who’ve watered down the message of the gospel seem to be prospering. If our ultimate goal is self rather than the glory of God, why put ourselves through the fires of sanctification and self-denial? Why be hated by the world when we can be double-tongued, duplicitous, and faithless and still be first in line at every potluck?

This is why our purpose must be well-defined and immovable. If it’s not, there will always be opportunities to skirt the uncomfortable parts, tame down the truth, or omit certain steps required in men’s spiritual growth to make our own walk less austere. A steadfast and well-defined purpose is our compass in the storm of compromise.

Timothy thoroughly studied three areas of Paul’s life: his doctrine, his walk, and his steadfastness. He’d passed the acid test on all three counts, and Paul reminds Timothy of this to reinforce the idea that it is through lived experience that he’d drawn the conclusions he had regarding the Christian walk and the prerequisites required for being a good and faithful soldier of Jesus Christ.

We rarely consider how much harder those of the early church had it than we do in our modern age. Sure, the disciples walked with Jesus, learned from Him, and saw His life, but a few decades on, all the next iteration of the church had were second-hand accounts and testimonies of those who knew someone who’d walked with Jesus.

It’s not as though they had the written Word to turn to for guidance, and those who oversaw the established religious system of the time weren’t much help because they were set on the destruction of the followers of Christ. Through it all, through the waves of martyrdom, through the persecutions, through the hardships and travails, the true body of Christ endured, persevered, and had the wherewithal to pass the truth on to the next generation.

It took the devil a while to figure it out, but he eventually realized that if you can corrupt the young before the seed of truth is planted in their hearts, if you can take easily impressionable minds and steer them toward darkness before they ever know the light exists, given enough time there will be no one left to pass the truth down to the next generation, nor will there be any who will be receptive to it in it.

Even if he’d figured it out, until recently, it was almost impossible to corrupt the minds of an entire generation wholesale. Parents still parented, schools still taught math and history, churches still preached Jesus, and the stream of corruption could be dammed up by unplugging the family television.

Posted on 26 August 2024 | 11:10 am