No Panicking

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So, I have some breaking news for my Christian friends after a divisive year and a difficult election season: the Church will not be destroyed. It will survive.

This is a certainty. Read the end of the story (which we’ve got in our hot little hands – either in print or on your Bible app). We have it on good authority from the church’s very own founder and maintainer: “the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”

Which means the government of the United States will not prevail against it either. And neither will the secular culture. Nor the Religious Right. The Church will survive. No doubt about it.

The way some folks are talking and acting these days, you’d think that was in question. There’s a whole lot of panicking going on. Ohhh, the transgender folk . . . ohhhh, the MAGA idiots . . . . ohhhh, the socialists . . .  there’s folks out there marryin’ people that shouldn’t be married . . . destroyin’ the planet with their sinful carbon emissions . . . makin’ us get shots like the mark of the beast . . . tryin' to control what goes on in my uterus . . . votin’ the devil into our legislatures . . . sittin’ at home watching church on a screen, Lord help us . . . readin’ scripture ALL wrong . . . lettin’ people sin with nary a consequence . . . ohhhh, sweet Jesus, save your people from the impending destruction . . . 

And I’ll confess, I’ve partaken in the panic as well. Election seasons do that to me.

But I was reminded of something recently (credit to Dr. Derrick Lynch at Blue Valley Baptist Church): panic is not a fruit of the Spirit. You cannot be faithful and hysterical at the same time. Faithful living demands confidence in God’s supremacy. Nothing going on now caught the Almighty by surprise. The Lord saw it all coming . . . and he allowed it. Just like the Lord delivered Judah into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, the idol-worshipping king of Babylon (Daniel 1). Nebuchadnezzar didn’t win – the Lord gave Judah to him. God was absolutely, positively in control of the whole affair. And he still is.

The Church will survive. Even better – the Church will thrive.

I think I’ve written about this before, but it had enough impact on me to be worth repeating. Many years ago, a couple years after the Iron Curtain fell and the Eastern Bloc countries were opened up, I heard a missionary from one of those countries speak. He was talking about how religious freedom had advanced dramatically in that nation, and the church was now free to meet and serve and publicly live their faith. There was much rejoicing at his testimony – how great is our God!

And then he told us about a question one of his congregants had for him a couple years into their glorious freedom. “Why?” the man had asked. “Why did God take away the blessing of persecution?”

The blessing of persecution. Let that sink in a moment.

When the church in that country was persecuted, they were strong. When it suddenly became easy to be a believer, their faith grew soft and weak.

I do not buy into this silliness about the church in America being persecuted. To paraphrase Dr. Lynch, that’s insulting to the people around the world who are actually suffering and even dying for their faith. We’ve got it easy here. And it shows, to our shame.

So, panic about a faith-hostile culture in America is unfounded, my friends. A bit of persecution may actually do us some good. We know the end of the story, after all. The Church survives.

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